The "Contrat
Social," and the rest of their doctrines, moral and metaphysical, will
always have their admirers on earth, as long as that variety of the
human species exists for whose especial behoof Theodorus held that laws
were made; and the whole form of thought met with great approbation in
after years at Rome, where Epicurus carried it to its highest
perfection. After that, under the pressure of a train of rather severe
lessons, which Gibbon has detailed in his "Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire," little or nothing was heard of it, save sotto voce, perhaps, at
the Papal courts of the sixteenth century. To revive it publicly, or at
least as much of it as could be borne by a world now for seventeen
centuries Christian, was the glory of the eighteenth century. The moral
scheme of Theodorus has now nearly vanished among us, at least as a
confessed creed; and, in spite of the authority of Mr. Locke's great and
good name, his metaphysical scheme is showing signs of a like
approaching disappearance. Let us hope that it may be a speedy one; for
if the senses be the only avenues to knowledge; if man be the measure of
all things; and if law have not, as Hooker says, her fount and home in
the very bosom of God himself, then was Homer's Zeus right in declaring
man to be "the most wretched of all the beasts of the field.
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