asceticism, as such, is reprobated in the Epistle to Timothy, as a doctrine of devils, and pleasure is recognized as a good gift of God in the words 'every creature of God is good, and nothing to be refused if it be received with thanksgiving.' So too with regard to its opposite, though there may be occasions on which the Christian will rejoice in tribulation, yet he is not bound to pretend, like the Stoic, that pain is not in itself an evil: on the contrary, the great Pattern of Christians, as He had always the tenderest sympathy for the sorrow of others, so in his own case He combined the utmost sensitiveness to pain with the unshaken resolution to do and to bear His Father's will. Lastly, the Christian belief in the immortality of each individual man, the belief that virtue, inchoate here, will be finally perfected hereafter, and have full scope for its exercise, that the ideals which nature even now suggests will there be more than realized, this sheds over life a warm and genial ray, in contrast to the grim austerity of the Porch, and supplies a solid basis for that which with them was scarcely more than a romantic and irrational optimism'. Christianity

1 The contrast between the Christian conception of an uninterrupted progress continued throughout eternity, and the Cyclical Regeneration by which the Stoics imagined that, after the general conflagration, all things would be reproduced in the same order, so that each Great Year should be an exact copy of its predecessors, is well pointed out in Dean Mansel's posthumous lectures on Gnosticism, p. 4, and illustrated by the beautiful chorus from Shelley's Hellas : The world's great age begins anew,

The golden years return;

The earth doth like a snake renew

Her winter weeds outworn;

Heaven smiles, and faiths and empires gleam
Like wrecks of a dissolving dream.

may in fact be regarded as the fulfilment of the dreams of Stoicism, as St Paul seems to suggest when he took a line of Cleanthes for his text in preaching at the Areopagus. The noblest things in Stoicism are the analogues to the three Christian Graces, the faith which led them to believe that all things were ordered by a good and wise Governor, the hope that made them look forward to the more perfect revelation of the City of God after death, the love which taught them that they were made for the world and not for themselves, that all mankind were one body. "The poet sings of beloved Athens, and shall not we sing of thee, O beloved City of Zeus','-do we not seem to hear in these words of Marcus Aurelius the tuning of the harp of Zion by the waters of Babylon ?

A brighter Hellas rears its mountains

From waves serener far;

A new Peneus rolls its fountains

Against the morning star.

Where (Here?) fairer Tempes bloom, there sleep

Young Cyclads on a sunnier deep.

A loftier Argo cleaves the main,
Fraught with a later prize;
Another Orpheus sings again,

And loves, and weeps, and dies.
A new Ulysses leaves once more
Calypso for his native shore.

cease! must hate and death return?
Cease! must men kill and die?
Cease! drain not to its dregs. the urn
Of bitter prophecy.

The world is weary of the past,

O might it die, or rest at last!

See further Zeller, p. 154, foll.

1Anton. IV. 23.

But if Stoicism is admirable, as promise of better things to come, what are we to say of it when it shows itself as the residuum of a dying faith? We may at least find it easier to understand the attraction which it had for the Thraseas and Arrias of the Empire, when we find pure Stoicism preached as the Gospel for our own day in such words as those of Carlyle. "This fair universe, were it in the meanest province thereof, is in very deed the star-domed City of God: through every star, through every grass-blade, and most through every Living Soul the glory of a present God still beams'.' "The situation which has not its Duty, its Ideal, was never yet occupied by man. Yes, here, in this poor, miserable, hampered, despicable Actual, wherein thou even now standest, here or nowhere is thy Ideal: work it out therefrom, and working, believe, live, be free. Fool! the Ideal is in thyself, the impediment too is in thyself: thy condition is but the stuff thou art to shape that same Ideal out of: what matters whether such stuff is of this sort or that, so the Form thou give it be heroic, be poetic?' 'Does not the whole wretchedness of man's ways in these generations shadow itself for us in that unspeakable Lifephilosophy of his: the pretension to be what he calls. happy?...We construct our theory of Human Duties not on any Greatest-Nobleness Principle, but on a GreatestHappiness Principle... But a life of ease is not for any man nor for any god". Again, what else is the 'New Faith'

1 Sartor Resartus, Bk. III. ch. 8.

2 Sartor Resartus, Bk. II. ch. 9.

3 Past and Present, Bk. III. ch. 4. Compare with the last clause the continual reference in Epictetus to the Labours of Hercules, as giving a pattern of the life which all men should lead; e.g. Diss. III.

put forward by Strauss than a revival of the least Christian side of Stoicism together with even an exaggeration of its old unrealities? The nature of this Neo-Stoicism' will be sufficiently apparent from the following passage. 'In regard to the Cosmos we know ourselves as part of a part; our might as naught in comparison to the almightiness of Nature; our thought only capable of slowly and laboriously comprehending the least part of that which the universe. offers to our contemplation as the object of knowledge... As we feel ourselves absolutely dependent on this world, as we can only deduce our existence and the adjustment of our nature from it, we are compelled to conceive of it as the primary source of all that is reasonable and good in ourselves as well as in it... That on which we feel ourselves thus dependent is no mere rude power to which we bow in mute resignation, but is at the same time both order and law, reason and goodness, to which we surrender ourselves in loving trust. More than this: as we perceive in ourselves the same disposition to the reasonable and the good, which we seem to recognize in the Cosmos, and find ourselves to be the beings by whom it is felt and recognized, in whom it is to become personified, we also feel ourselves related in our inmost nature to that on which we are dependent, we discover ourselves at the same time to be free in this dependence: and pride and humility, joy and submission, intermingle in our feeling for the Cosmos...We consider it arrogant and profane on the part of a single individual 26, 31 τρυφᾶν με οὐ θέλει ὁ θεός, οὐδὲ γὰρ τῷ Ἡρακλεῖ παρεῖχε τῷ υἱῷ τῷ ἑαυτοῦ.

1 The Old Faith and the New, Eng. tr. p. 161.

to oppose himself with such audacious levity [as the Pessimists do] to the Cosmos, whence he springs, from which also he derives that spark of reason [compare the ἀπόῤῥοια and ἀπόσπασμα of the Stoics] which he misuses. ...We demand the same piety for our Cosmos that the devout of old demanded for his God'.'

The hymn of Cleanthes may fitly conclude our account of the Stoics. 'O Thou of many names, most glorious of immortals, Almighty Zeus, sovereign ruler of Nature, directing all things in accordance with law; Thee it is right that all mortals should address, for Thine offspring we are, and, alone of all creatures that live and move on earth, have received from Thee the gift of imitative sound'. Wherefore I will hymn thy praise and sing thy might for ever. The universe, as it rolls around this earth, obeys Thy guidance and willingly submits to Thy control. Such a minister Thou holdest in thine invincible hands, the twoedged thunderbolt of ever-living fire, at whose strokes all nature trembles...No work is done without Thee, O Lord, neither on earth, nor in the heaven, nor in the sea, except what the wicked do in their foolishness. Thou knowest how to make the rough smooth, and bringest order out of disorder, and things not friendly are friendly in Thy sight for so hast Thou fitted all things together, good and evil alike, that there might be one eternal law and reason for all things. The wicked heed it not,

1 It is worthy of note that Strauss also accepts the Stoic conflagration, see p. 180.

2 The Stoics thought that names were given púσeɩ où vóμw, and that in some way they represented the real nature of the thing, μιμουμένων φωνῶν τὰ πράγματα, see Orig. c. Cels. Ι. 24.

3 Literally 'to make what is odd even.'

M. P.

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