There is a maxim which we all know, which occurs in our copybooks, which occurs in that solemn and beautiful formulary against which the Nonconformist genius is just now so angrily chafing,–the Burial Service. The maxim is this: “Evil communications corrupt good manners.” It is taken from a chapter of the First Epistle to the Corinthians; but originally it is a line of poetry, of Greek poetry. Quid Athenis et Hierosolymis? asks a Father; what have Athens and Jerusalem to do with one another? Well, at any rate, the Jerusalemite Paul, exhorting his converts, enforces what he is saying by a verse of Athenian comedy,–a verse, probably, from the great master of that comedy, a man unsurpassed for fine and just observation of human life, Menander: Φθείϱουσιν ἤθη χϱήσθʾ ὁμιλίαι ϰαϰαί–“Evil communications corrupt good manners.”

In that collection of single, sententious lines, printed at the end of Menander's fragments, where we now find the maxim quoted by St. Paul, there is another striking maxim, not alien certainly to the language of the Christian religion, but which has not passed into our copy-books: “Choose equality and flee greed.” The same profound observer, who laid down the maxim so universally accepted by us that it has become commonplace, the maxim that evil communications corrupt good manners, laid down also, as a no less sure result of the accurate study of human life, this other maxim as well: “Choose equality and flee greed”–ʾΙσότητα δʾ αἱϱοῦ ϰαὶ πλεονεξίαν φύγε.