The Stoic Creed - College of Stoic Philosophers

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THEOLOGY AND RELIGION 225
great whole, so that in all things reigns
one reason
everlastingly."
This is, doubtless, true; but it does
not solve the problem
it
only makes us somewhat
more ready to acquiesce in the existence of evil, by
making us more hopeful.
(3)
It is also but the inculcation of a faith a noble
faith, no doubt, yet not an intellectual solution of the
difficulty when Seneca rises to what one might call
the Scriptural height of regarding suffering as discipli
nary, and as God s token of love and Fatherly affection
for His children. With lucidity and light, the subject
is worked out in his treatise, De Providential If, on
the one hand, he there maintains that calamity is the
occasion of virtue and that "he is
vanquished without
glory who is vanquished without danger,"
he strongly
insists, on the other hand, on the immense value of
hardships and difficulties in forming character and in
producing manly generous spirits. We are soldiers, he
says, we are sailors, and need to be inured to dangers
in order that we may despise them, and to be exercised
in order that our faculties and organs may develop
and attain perfection. We have to grow, like trees ;
and trees become strong and noble and root themselves
securely in the earth only when exposed to frequent
winds and tempests
:
fragile are the plants that grow
in the sunny valley." Yea, further, it is the most
promising pupils to whom the master gives the hardest
tasks ;
and sometimes, moreover, the individual has to
suffer for the sake of the general, and good men are
afflicted in order to teach others how to endure.
1
Or, to give it its full title, Quare Aliqua incommoda bonis viris
accidant cum Providentia sit,
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