discharged their civil duties, and were in all the current senses of the word "moral” men.1

It has also been common to frame statements of the moral philosophy which dominated in those centuries, entirely from the data afforded by earlier writers, and to account for the existence of nobler elements in contemporary writers by the hypothesis that Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius, had come into contact with Christian teachers. In the case of Seneca, the belief in such contact went so far as to induce a writer in an imitative age to produce a series of letters which are still commonly printed at the end of his works, and which purport to be a correspondence between him and St. Paul. It is difficult, no doubt, to prove the negative proposition that such writers did not come into contact with Christianity; but a strong presumption against the idea that such contact, if it existed, influenced to any considerable extent their ethical principles, is established by the demonstrable fact that those principles form an integral part of their whole philosophical system, and that their system is in close logical and historical connection with that of their philosophical predecessors.2

It will be found on a closer examination that the age in which Christianity grew was in reality an age of moral

1 The evidence for the above statements has not yet been fully gathered together, and is too long to be given even in outline here: the statements are in full harmony with the view of the chief modern writer on the subject, Friedländer, Darstellungen aus dem Sittengeschichte Roms, see especially Bd. iii. p. 676, 5te aufl.

2 This is sufficiently shown by the fact, which is in other respects to be regretted, that in most accounts of Stoicism the earlier and later elements are viewed as constituting a homogeneous whole.

reformation. There was the growth of a higher religious morality, which believed that God was pleased by moral action rather than by sacrifice.1 There was the growth of a belief that life requires amendment.2 There was a reaction in the popular mind against the vices of the great centres of population. This is especially seen in the large multiplication of religious guilds, in which purity of life was a condition of membership: it prepared the minds of men to receive Christian teaching, and forms not the least important among the causes which led to the rapid dissemination of that teaching: it affected the development of Christianity in that the members of the religious guilds who did so accept Christian teaching, brought over with them into the Christian communities many of the practices of their guilds and of the conceptions which lay beneath them. The philosophical phase of the reformation began on the confines of Stoicism and Cynicism. For Cynicism had revived. It had almost faded into insignificance after Zene and Chrysippus had formed its nobler elements into a new system, and left only its "dog-bark "3 and its squalor. But when the philosophical descendants of Zeno and Chrysippus had become fashionable littérateurs, and had sunk independence of thought and practice in a respectability and "worldly conformity"

1 "How am I to eat?" said a man to Epictetus: "So as to please God," was the reply (Diss. 1. 13). The idea is further developed in Porphyry, who says: "God wants nothing (281. 15): the God who is ἐπὶ πᾶσιν is ἄϋλος; hence all ἔνυλον is to Him ἀκάθαρτον, and should therefore not be offered to Him, not even the spoken word (163. 15). 2 M. Aurelius owed to Rusticus the idea that life required Stópowols and fepareta (i. 7 and ii. 13).

3 Tò Ülakreiv, Philostr. 587.

which the more earnest men felt to be intolerable, Cynicism revived, or rather the earlier and better Stoicism revived, to re-assert the paramount importance of moral conduct, and to protest against the unnatural alliance between philosophy and the fashionable world.

It is to this moral reformation within the philosophical sphere that I wish especially to draw your attention. Its chief preacher was Epictetus. He was ranked among the Stoics; but his portrait of an ideal philosopher is the portrait of a Cynic.1 In him, whether he be called Stoic or Cynic, the ethics of the ancient world find at once their loftiest expression and their most complete realization and it will be an advantage, instead of endeavouring to construct a composite and comprehensive picture from all the available materials, to limit our view mainly to what Epictetus says, and, as far as possible, to let his sermons speak for themselves.

The reformation affected chiefly two points: (1) the place of ethics in relation to philosophy and life; (2) the contents of ethical teaching.

1. The Stoics of the later Republic and of the age of the Cæsars had come to give their chief attention to logic and literature. The study of ethics was no longer supreme; and it had changed its character. Logic, which in the systems of Zeno and Chrysippus had been only its servant, was becoming its master: it was both usurping its place and turning it into casuistry. The study of literature, of what the great masters of philosophy had taught, was superseding the moral practice which such

1 The title of Diss. 3. 22, in which the ideal philosopher is described, is περὶ Κυνισμοῦ.

study was intended to help and foster. The Stoics of the time could construct ingenious fallacies and compose elegant moral discourses; but they were ceasing to regard the actual "living according to nature" as the main object of their lives. The revival of Cynicism was a re-assertion of the supremacy of ethics over logic, and of conduct over literary knowledge. It was at first crude and

The

repulsive. If the Stoics were "the preachers of the salon," the Cynics were "the preachers of the street.”1 They were the mendicant friars of imperial times. They were earnest, but they were squalid. The earnestness was of the essence, the squalor was accidental. former was absorbed by Stoicism and gave it a new impulse the latter dropped off as an excrescence when Cynicism was tested by time. Epictetus was not carried as far as the Cynics were in the reaction against Logic. The Cynics would have postponed the study of it indefinitely. Moral reformation is more pressing, they said.2 Epictetus holds to the necessity of the study of Logic as a prophylactic against the deceitfulness of arguments and the plausibility of language. But he deprecates the exaggerated importance which had come to be attached to it. The students of his day were giving an altogether disproportionate attention to the weaving of fallacious arguments and the mere setting of traps to catch men in their speech. He would restore Logic to its original subordination. Neither it nor the whole dogmatic phi

1 H. Schiller, Geschichte der römischen Kaiserzeit, Bd. i. 452.

2 Diss. 1. 17. 4, éπeiyei μâλλov Oepareveiv, the interpolated remark of a student when Epictetus has begun a lecture upon Logic: the addition, kai тà öμola, seems to show that the phrase was a customary one.

losophy of which it was the instrument was of value in itself. And moreover, whatever might be the place of such knowledge in an abstract system and in an ideal world, it was impossible to disregard the actual conditions of the world as it is. The state of human nature is such, that to linger upor the threshold of philosophy is to induce a moral torpor. The student who aims at shaping his reason into harmony with nature has to begin, not with unformed and plastic material, which he can fashion to his will by systematic rules of art, but with his nature as it is shaped already, almost beyond possibility of unshaping, by pernicious habits, and beguiling associations of ideas, and false opinions about good and evil. While you are teaching him logic and physics, the very evils which it is his object to remedy will be gathering fresh strength. The old familiar names of "good" and "evil," with all the false ideas which they suggest, will be giving birth at every moment to mistaken judgments and wrong actions, to all the false pleasures and false pains which it is the very purpose of philosophy to destroy. He must begin, as he must end, with practice. He must accept precepts and act upon them before he learns the theory of them. His progress in philosophy must be measured by his progress, not in knowledge, but in moral conduct.

This view, which Epictetus preaches again and again with passionate fervour, will be best stated in his own words: 1

A man who is making progress, having learnt from the philosophers that desire has good things for its object and undesire 1 Diss. 1. 4.