It is “peaceable, gentle, and easy to be entreated.”  The Christian doctrine teacheth us all those dispositions that make us affable and courteous, gentle and kind, without any morose leaven of pride or vanity, which entered into the composition of most heathen schemes:  so we are taught to be meek and lowly.  Our Saviour’s last legacy was peace, and He commands us to forgive our offending brother unto seventy times seven.  Christian wisdom is full of mercy and good works, teaching the height of all moral virtues, of which the heathens fell infinitely short.  Plato indeed (and it is worth observing) has somewhere a dialogue, or part of one, about forgiving our enemies, which was perhaps the highest strain ever reached by man without Divine assistance; yet how little is that to what our Saviour commands us, “To love them that hate us, to bless them that curse us, and to do good to them that despitefully use us.”

Christian wisdom is “without partiality;” it is not calculated for this or that nation of people, but the whole race of mankind.  Not so the philosophical schemes, which were narrow and confined, adapted to their peculiar towns, governments, or sects; but “in every nation, he that feareth God and worketh righteousness is accepted with Him.”

Lastly, It is “without hypocrisy;” it appears to be what it really is; it is all of a piece.  By the doctrines of the Gospel we are so far from being allowed to publish to the world those virtues we have not, that we are commanded to hide even from ourselves those we really have, and not to let our right hand know what our left hand does, unlike several branches of the heathen wisdom, which pretended to teach insensibility and indifference, magnanimity and contempt of life, while at the same time, in other parts, it belied its own doctrines.

I come now, in the last place, to show that the great examples of wisdom and virtue among the Grecian sages were produced by personal merit; and not influenced by the doctrine of any particular sect, whereas in Christianity it is quite the contrary.

The two virtues most celebrated by ancient moralists were fortitude and temperance, as relating to the government of man in his private capacity, to which their schemes were generally addressed and confined, and the two instances wherein those virtues arrived at the greatest height were Socrates and Cato.  But neither these, nor any other virtues possessed by these two, were at all owing to any lessons or doctrines of a sect.  For Socrates himself was of none at all; and although Cato was called a Stoic, it was more from a resemblance of manners in his worst qualities, than that he avowed himself one of their disciples.  The same may be affirmed of many other great men of antiquity.  Whence I infer that those who were renowned for virtue among them were more obliged to the good natural dispositions of their own minds than to the doctrines of any sect they pretended to follow.