The attempts of the Christian Fathers to show that the truths of ancient philosophy were borrowed from Scripture are due in some cases to ignorance and in some to a want of perfect honesty in controversial dealing. That Gideon (Jerubbaal) is identical with the priest Hierombalos who supplied information to Sanchoniathon, the Berytian; that Thales pieced together a philosophy from fragments of Jewish truth learned in Phoenicia; that Pythagoras and Democritus availed themselves of Hebraic traditions, collected during their travels; that Plato is a mere "Atticising Moses;" that Aristotle picked up his ethical system from a Jew whom he met in Asia; that Seneca corresponded with St. Paul: are assertions every bit as unhistorical and false as that Homer was thinking of Genesis when he described the shield of Achilles, or (as Clemens of Alexandria gravely informs us) that Miltiades won the battle of Marathon by copying the strategy of the battle of Beth-Horon! To say that Pagan morality "kindled its faded taper at the Gospel light, whether furtively or unconsciously taken," and that it "dissembled the obligation, and made a boast of the splendour as though it were originally her own, or were sufficient in her hands for the moral illumination of the world;" is to make an assertion wholly untenable.[71] Seneca, Epictetus, Aurelius, are among the truest and loftiest of Pagan moralists, yet Seneca ignored the Christians, Epictetus despised, and Aurelius persecuted them. All three, so far as they knew anything about the Christians at all, had unhappily been taught to look upon them as the most detestable sect of what they had long regarded as the most degraded and the most detestable of religions.

[Footnote 71: See for various statements in this passage, Josephus, c. Apion. ii. Section 36; Cic. De Fin. v. 25; Clem. Alex. Strom, 1, xxii. 150, xxv. v. 14; Euseb.; Prof. Evang. x. 4, ix. 5, &c.; Lactant. Inst. Div. iv. 2, &c.]

There is something very touching in this fact; but, if there be something very touching, there is also something very encouraging. God was their God as well as ours—their Creator, their Preserver, who left not Himself without witness among them; who, as they blindly felt after Him, suffered their groping hands to grasp the hem of His robe; who sent them rain from heaven, and fruitful seasons, filling their hearts with joy and gladness. And His Spirit was with them, dwelling in them, though unseen and unknown, purifying and sanctifying the temple of their hearts, sending gleams of illuminating light through the gross darkness which encompassed them, comforting their uncertainties, making intercession for them with groaning which cannot be uttered. And more than all, our Saviour was their Saviour, too; He, whom they regarded as a crucified malefactor was their true invisible King; through His righteousness their poor merits were accepted; their inward sicknesses were healed; He whose worship they denounced as an "execrable superstition" stood supplicating for them at the right hand of the Majesty on high, helping them (though they knew Him not) to crush all that was evil within them, and pleading for them when they persecuted even the most beloved of His saints, "Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do."

Yes, they too were all His offspring. Even if they had not been, should we grudge that some of the children's meat should be given unto dogs? Shall we deny to these "unconscious prophecies of heathendom" their oracular significance? Shall we be jealous of the ethical loftiness of a Plato or an Aurelius? Shall we be loth to admit that some power of the Spirit of Christ, even mid the dark wanderings of Seneca's life, kept him still conscious of a nobler and a better way, or that some sweetness of a divine hope inspired the depressions of Epictetus in his slavery? Shall our eye be evil because God in His goodness granted the heathen also to know such truths as enabled them "to overcome the allurements of the visible and the terrors of the invisible world?" Yes, if we have of the Christian Church so mean a conception that we look upon it as a mere human society, "set up in the world to defend a certain religion against a certain other religion." But if on the other hand we believe "that it was a society established by God as a witness for the true condition of all human beings, we shall rejoice to acknowledge its members to be what they believed themselves to be,—confessors and martyrs for a truth which they could not fully embrace or comprehend, but which, through their lives and deaths, through the right and wrong acts, the true and false words, of those who understand them least, was to manifest and prove itself. Those who hold this conviction dare not conceal, or misrepresent, or undervalue, any one of those weighty and memorable sentences which are to be found in the Meditation of Marcus Aurelius. If they did, they would be underrating a portion of that very truth which the preachers of the Gospel were appointed to set forth; they would be adopting the error of the philosophical Emperor without his excuse for it. Nor dare they pretend that the Christian teaching had unconsciously imparted to him a portion of its own light while he seemed to exclude it. They will believe that it was God's good pleasure that a certain truth should be seized and apprehended by this age, and they will see indications of what that truth was in the efforts of Plutarch to understand the 'Daemon' which guided Socrates, in the courageous language of Ignatius, in the bewildering dreams of the Gnostics, in the eagerness of Justin Martyr to prove Christianity a philosophy ... in the apprehension of Christian principles by Marcus Aurelius, and in his hatred of the Christians. From every side they will derive evidence, that a doctrine and society which were meant for mankind cannot depend upon, the partial views and apprehensions of men, must go on justifying, reconciling, confuting, those views and apprehensions by the demonstration of facts" [72]

[Footnote 72: Maurice, Philos. of the First Six Centuries, p. 37. We venture specially to recommend this weighty and beautiful passage to the reader's serious attention.]

But perhaps some reader will say, What advantage, then, can we gain by studying in Pagan writers truths which are expressed more nobly, more clearly, and infinitely more effectually in our own sacred books? Before answering the question, let me mention the traditional anecdote[73] of the Caliph Omar. When he conquered Alexandria, he was shown its magnificent library, in which were collected untold treasures of literature, gathered together by the zeal, the labour, and the liberality of a dynasty of kings. "What is the good of all those books?" he said. "They are either in accordance with the Koran, or contrary to it. If the former they are superfluous; if the latter they are pernicious. In either case let them be burnt." Burnt they were, as legend tells; but all the world has condemned the Caliph's reasoning as a piece of stupid Philistinism and barbarous bigotry. Perhaps the question as to the use of reading Pagan ethics is equally unphilosophical; at any rate, we can spare but very few words to its consideration. The answer obviously is, that God has spoken to men, [Greek: polymeros kai polytropos], "at sundry times and in divers manners," [74] with a richly variegated wisdom.[75] Sometimes He has taught truth by the voice of Hebrew prophets, sometimes by the voice of Pagan philosophers. And all His voices demand our listening ear. If it was given to the Jew to speak with diviner insight and intenser power, it is given to the Gentile also to speak at times with a large and lofty utterance, and we may learn truth from men of alien lips and another tongue. They, too, had the dream, the vision, the dark saying upon the harp, the "daughter of a voice," the mystic flashes upon the graven gems. And such truths come to us with a singular force and freshness; with a strange beauty as the doctrines of a less brightly illuminated manhood; with a new power of conviction from their originality of form, which, because it is less familiar to us, is well calculated to arrest our attention after it has been paralysed by familiar repetitions. We cannot afford to lose these heathen testimonies to Christian truth; or to hush the glorious utterances of Muse and Sibyl which have justly outlived "the drums and tramplings of a hundred triumphs." We may make them infinitely profitable to us. If St. Paul quotes Aratus, and Menander, and Epimenides,[76] and perhaps more than one lyrical melody besides, with earnest appreciation,—if the inspired Apostle could both learn himself and teach others out of the utterances of a Cretan philosopher and an Attic comedian, we may be sure that many of Seneca's apophthegams would have filled him with pleasure, and that he would have been able to read Epictetus and Aurelius with the same noble admiration which made him see with thankful emotion that memorable altar TO THE UNKNOWN GOD.

[Footnote 73: Now known to be unhistorical.]

[Footnote 74: Heb. i. 1.]

[Footnote 75: [Greek: polypoikilos dophia].]

[Footnote 76: See Acts xvii. 28; 1 Cor.; Tit. i. 12.]

Let us then make a brief and final sketch of the three great Stoics whose lives we have been contemplating, with a view to summing up their specialties, their deficiencies, and the peculiar relations to, or divergences from, Christian truth, which their writings present to us.

"Seneca saepe noster," "Seneca, often our own," is the expression of Tertullian, and he uses it as an excuse for frequent references to his works. Yet if, of the three, he be most like Christianity in particular passages, he diverges most widely from it in his general spirit.

He diverges from Christianity in many of his modes of regarding life, and in many of his most important beliefs. What, for instance, is his main conception of the Deity? Seneca is generally a Pantheist. No doubt he speaks of God's love and goodness, but with him God is no personal living Father, but the soul of the universe—the fiery, primaeval, eternal principle which transfuses an inert, and no less eternal, matter, and of which our souls are, as it were, but divine particles or passing sparks. "God," he says, "is Nature, is Fate, is Fortune, is the Universe, is the all-pervading Mind. He cannot change the substance of the universe, He is himself under the power of Destiny, which is uncontrollable and immutable. It is not God who rolls the thunder, it is Fate. He does not rejoice in His works, but is identical with them." In fact, Seneca would have heartily adopted the words of Pope:

"All are but parts of one stupendous whole, Whose body nature is, and God the soul."

Though there may be a vague sense in which those words may be admitted and explained by Christians, yet, in the mind of Seneca, they led to conclusions directly opposed to those of Christianity. With him, for instance, the wise man is the equal of God; not His adorer, not His servant, not His suppliant, but His associate, His relation. He differs from God in time alone. Hence all prayer is needless he says, and the forms of external worship are superfluous and puerile. It is foolish to beg for that which you can impart to yourself. "What need is there of vows? Make yourself happy." Nay, in the intolerable arrogance which marked the worst aberration of Stoicism, the wise man is under certain aspects placed even higher than God—higher than God Himself—because God is beyond the reach of misfortunes, but the wise man is superior to their anguish; and because God is good of necessity, but the wise man from choice. This wretched and inflated paradox occurs in Seneca's treatise On Providence, and in the same treatise he glorifies suicide, and expresses a doubt as to the immortality of the soul.

Again, the two principles on which Seneca relied as the basis of all his moral system are: first, the principle that we ought to follow Nature; and, secondly, the supposed perfectibility of the ideal man.

1. Now, of course, if we explain this precept of "following Nature" as Juvenal has explained it, and say that the voice of Nature is always coincident with the voice of philosophy—if we prove that our real nature is none other than the dictate of our highest and most nobly trained reason, and if we can establish the fact that every deed of cruelty, of shame, of lust, or of selfishness, is essentially contrary to our nature—then we may say with Bishop Butler, that the precept to "follow Nature" is "a manner of speaking not loose and undeterminate, but clear and distinct, strictly just and true." But how complete must be the system, how long the preliminary training, which alone can enable us to find any practical value, any appreciable aid to a virtuous life, in a dogma such as this! And, in the hands of Seneca, it becomes a very empty formula. He entirely lacked the keen insight and dialectic subtlety of such a writer as Bishop Butler; and, in his explanation of this Stoical shibboleth, any real meaning which it may possess is evaporated into a gorgeous mist of confused declamation and splendid commonplace.

2. Nor is he much more fortunate with his ideal man. This pompous abstraction presents us with a conception at once ambitious and sterile. The Stoic wise man is a sort of moral Phoenix, impossible and repulsive. He is intrepid in dangers, free from all passion, happy in adversity, calm in the storm; he alone knows how to live, because he alone knows how to die; he is the master of the world, because he is master of himself, and the equal of God; he looks down upon everything with sublime imperturbability, despising the sadnesses of humanity and smiling with irritating loftiness at all our hopes and all our fears. But, in another sketch of this faultless and unpleasant monster, Seneca presents us, not the proud athlete who challenges the universe and is invulnerable to all the stings and arrows of passion or of fate, but a hero in the serenity of absolute triumph, more tender, indeed, but still without desires, without passions, without needs, who can fell no pity, because pity is a weakness which disturbs his sapient calm! Well might the eloquent Bossuet exclaim, as he read of these chimerical perfections, "It is to take a tone too lofty for feeble and mortal men. But, O maxims truly pompous! O affected insensibility! O false and imaginary wisdom! which fancies itself strong because it is hard, and generous because it is puffed up! How are these principles opposed to the modest simplicity of the Saviour of souls, who, in our Gospel contemplating His faithful ones in affliction, confesses that they will be saddened by it! Ye shall weep and lament." Shall Christians be jealous of such wisdom as Stoicism did really attain, when they compare this dry and bloodless ideal with Him who wept over Jerusalem and mourned by the grave of Lazarus, who had a mother and a friend, who disdained none, who pitied all, who humbled Himself to death, even the death of the cross, whose divine excellence we cannot indeed attain because He is God, but whose example we can imitate because He was very man?[77]

[Footnote 77: See Martha, Les Moralistes, p. 50; Aubertin, Seneque et St. Paul p. 250.]

The one grand aim of the life and philosophy of Seneca was Ease. It is the topic which constantly recurs in his books On a Happy Life, On Tranquility of Mind, On Anger, and On the Ease and On the Firmness of the Sage. It is the pitiless apathy, the stern repression, of every form of emotion, which was constantly glorified as the aim of philosophy. It made Stilpo exclaim, when he had lost wife, property, and children, that he had lost nothing, because he carried in his own person everything which he possessed. It led Seneca into all that is most unnatural, all that is most fantastic, and all that is least sincere in his writings; it was the bitter source of disgrace and failure in his life. It comes out worst of all in his book On Anger. Aristotle had said that "Anger was a good servant but a bad master;" Plato had recognized the immense value and importance of the irascible element in the moral constitution. Even Christian writers, in spite of Bishop Butler, have often lost sight of this truth, and have forgotten that to a noble nature "the hate of hate" and the "scorn of scorn" are as indispensable as "the love of love." But Seneca almost gets angry himself at the very notion of the wise man being angry and indignant even against moral evil. No, he must not get angry, because it would disturb his sublime calm; and, if he allowed himself to be angry at wrong-doing, he would have to be angry all day long. This practical Epicureanism, this idle acquiescence in the supposed incurability of evil, poisoned all Seneca's career. "He had tutored himself," says Professor Maurice, "to endure personal injuries without indulging an anger; he had tutored himself to look upon all moral evil without anger. If the doctrine is sound and the discipline desirable, we must be content to take the whole result of them. If we will not do that, we must resolve to hate oppression and wrong, even at the cost of philosophical composure" But repose is not to be our aim:—

"We have no right to bliss, No title from the gods to welfare and repose."

It is one of the truths which seems to me most needed in the modern religious world, that the type of a Christian's virtue must be very miserable, and ordinary, and ineffectual, if he does not feel his whole soul burn within him with an almost implacable moral indignation at the sight of cruelty and injustice, of Pharisaic faithlessness and social crimes.

I have thus freely criticised the radical defects of Stoicism, so far as Seneca is its legitimate exponent; but I cannot consent to leave him with the language of depreciation, and therefore here I will once more endorse what an anonymous writer has said of him: "An unconscious Christianity covers all his sentiments. If the fair fame of the man is sullied, the aspiration to a higher life cannot be denied to the philosopher; if the tinkling cymbal of a stilted Stoicism sometimes sounds through the nobler music, it still leaves the truer melody vibrating on the ear."

2. If Seneca sought for EASE, the grand aim of Epictetus was FREEDOM, of Marcus Aurelius was SELF-GOVERNMENT. This difference of aim characterises their entire philosophy, though all three of them are filled with precepts which arise from the Stoical contempt of opinion, of fortune, and of death. "Epictetus, the slave, with imperturbable calm, voluntarily strikes off the desire for all those blessings of which fortune had already deprived him. Seneca, who lived in the Court, fenced himself beforehand against misfortune with the spirit of a man of the world and the emphasis of a master of eloquence. Marcus Aurelius, at the zenith of human power—having nothing to dread except his passions, and finding nothing above him except immutable necessity,—surveys his own soul and meditates especially on the eternal march of things. The one is the resigned slave, who neither desires nor fears; the other, the great lord, who has everything to lose; the third, finally, the emperor, who is dependent only on himself and upon God."

Of Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius we shall have very little to say by way of summary, for they show no inconsistencies and very few of the imperfections which characterise Seneca's ideal of the Stoic philosophy. The "moral peddling," the pedagogic display, the puerile ostentation, the antithetic brilliancy, which we have had to point out in Seneca, are wanting in them. The picture of the inner life, indeed, of Seneca, his efforts after self-discipline, his untiring asceticism, his enthusiasm for all that he esteems holy and of good report-this picture, marred as it is by rhetoric and vain self-conceit, yet "stands out in noble contrast to the swinishness of the Campanian villas, and is, in its complex entirety, very sad and affecting." And yet we must admit, in the words of the same writer, that when we go from Seneca to Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, "it is going from the florid to the severe, from varied feeling to the impersonal simplicity of the teacher, often from idle rhetoric to devout earnestness." As far as it goes, the morality of these two great Stoics is entirely noble and entirely beautiful. If there be even in Epictetus some passing and occasional touch of Stoic arrogance and Stoic apathy; if there be in Marcus Aurelius a depth and intensity of sadness which shows how comparatively powerless for comfort was a philosophy which glorified suicide, which knew but little of immortality, and which lost in vague Pantheism the unspeakable blessing of realizing a personal relation to a personal God and Father—there is yet in both of them enough and more than enough to show that in all ages and in all countries they who have sought for God have found Him, that they have attained to high principles of thought and to high standards of action—that they have been enabled, even in the thick darkness, resolutely to place their feet at least on the lowest rounds of that ladder of sunbeams which winds up through the darkness to the great Father of Lights.

And yet the very existence of such men is in itself a significant comment upon the Scriptural decision that "the world by wisdom knew not God." For how many like them, out of all the records of antiquity, is it possible for us to count? Are there five men in the whole circle of ancient history and ancient literature to whom we could, without a sense of incongruity, accord the title of "holy?" When we have mentioned Socrates, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius, I hardly know of another. Just men there were in multitudes—men capable of high actions; men eminently worthy to be loved; men, I doubt not, who, when the children of the kingdom shall be rejected, shall be gathered from the east and the west with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, into the kingdom of heaven. Yes, just men in multitudes; but how many righteous, how many holy? Some, doubtless, whom we do not know, whose names were never written, even for a few years, on the records of mankind—men and women in unknown villages and humble homes, "the faithful who were not famous." We do not doubt that there were such—but were they relatively numerous? If those who rose above the level of the multitude—if those whom some form of excellence, and often of virtue, elevated into the reverence of their fellows—present to us a few examples of stainless life, can we hope that a tolerable ideal of sanctity was attained by any large proportion of the ordinary myriads? Seeing that the dangerous lot of the majority was cast amid the weltering sea of popular depravity, can we venture to hope that many of them succeeded in reaching some green island of purity, integrity, and calm? We can hardly think it; and yet, in the dispensation of the Kingdom of Heaven we see such a condition daily realized. Not only do we see many of the eminent, but also countless multitudes of the lowly and obscure, whose common lives are, as it were, transfigured with a light from heaven. Unhappy, indeed, is he who has not known such men in person, and whose hopes and habits have not caught some touch of radiance reflected from the nobility and virtue of lives like these. The thought has been well expressed by the author of Ecce Homo, and we may well ask with him, "If this be so, has Christ failed, or can Christianity die?"

No, it has not failed; it cannot die; for the saving knowledge which it has imparted is the most inestimable blessing which God has granted to our race. We have watched philosophy in its loftiest flight, but that flight rose as far above the range of the Pagan populace as Ida or Olympus rises above the plain: and even the topmost crests of Ida and Olympus are immeasurably below the blue vault, the body of heaven in its clearness, to which it has been granted to some Christians to attain. As regards the multitude, philosophy had no influence over the heart and character; "it was sectarian, not universal; the religion of the few, not of the many. It exercised no creative power over political or social life; it stood in no such relation to the past as the New Testament to the Old. Its best thoughts were but views and aspects of the truth; there was no centre around which they moved, no divine life by which they were impelled; they seemed to vanish and flit in uncertain succession of light." But Christianity, on the other hand, glowed with a steady and unwavering brightness; it not only swayed the hearts of individuals by stirring them to their utmost depths, but it moulded the laws of nations, and regenerated the whole condition of society. It gave to mankind a fresh sanction in the word of Christ, a perfect example in His life, a powerful motive in His love, an all sufficient comfort in the life of immortality made sure and certain to us by His Resurrection and Ascension. But if without this sanction, and example, and motive, and comfort, the pagans could learn to do His will,—if, amid the gross darkness through which glitters the degraded civilization of imperial Rome, an Epictetus and an Aurelius could live blameless lives in a cell and on a throne, and a Seneca could practise simplicity and self-denial in the midst of luxury and pride—how much loftier should be both the zeal and the attainments of us to whom God has spoken by His Son? What manner of men ought we to be? If Tyre and Sidon and Sodom shall rise in the judgment to bear witness against Chorazin and Bethsaida, may not the pure lives of these great Seekers after God add a certain emphasis of condemnation to the vice, the pettiness, the mammon-worship of many among us to whom His love, His nature, His attributes have been revealed with a clearness and fullness of knowledge for which kings and philosophers have sought indeed and sought earnestly, but sought in vain?

THE END