may be seen in some foreign churches now) offered by those shipwrecked seamen who had been saved from drowning. "Lo, thou that deniest a Providence, behold here how many have been saved by prayer to the gods!" "Yea," was his reply; "but where are those commemorated who were drowned?"
The Dialogue ends with no resolution of the difficulties, and no conclusion as to the points in question. Cicero, who is the narrator of the imaginary conference, gives it as his opinion that the arguments of the Stoic seemed to him to have "the greater probability." It was the great tenet of the school which he most affected, that probability was the nearest approach that man could make to speculative truth. "We are not among those," he says, "to whom there seems to be no such thing as truth; but we say that all truths have some falsehoods attached to them which have so strong a resemblance to truth, that in such cases there is no certain note of distinction which can determine our judgment and assent. The consequence of which is that there are many things probable; and although they are not subjects of actual perception to our senses, yet they have so grand and glorious an aspect that a wise man governs his life thereby."[1] It remained for one of our ablest and most philosophical Christian writers to prove that in such matters probability was practically equivalent to demonstration.[2] Cicero's own form of scepticism in religious
