nature were preserved and widely circulated in heathen traditions. The poets of antiquity delighted to sing of a golden age, distinguished by the absence of crime and exemption from all suffering, when men enjoyed uninterrupted communion with the gods. The philosophers also of the ancient world were fully cognizant of the fact of the moral corruption of the race—a truth learned not from tradition or poetic pictures of the past, but from the painful experience of the present, with which they themselves