The Stoic Creed - College of Stoic Philosophers

PRESENT-DAY VALUE OF STOICISM 251
rooting- out the deep - seated chronic disease, and
triumphs over Death. On the roaring billows of Time
thou art not engulfed but borne aloft into the azure of
Eternity. Love not Pleasure ;
love God. This is the
Everlasting Yea, wherein all contradiction is solved :
"
wherein whoso walks and works, it is well with him
(Carlyle, Sartor Re sartus^ ii. 9).
Again, could anything, on high religious lines, be
nobler than the following utterance of Epictetus about
Duty, and about the privilege
of man as a rational
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being to live in conscious union with the Supreme
and to joyfully serve Him? "For,"
he says,
"had
we understanding, ought we to do anything else,
jointly and severally, than hymn the divine, and praise
Him, and rehearse His benefits ? Ought we not, when
digging or ploughing or eating, to sing this hymn to
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God ? Great is God, inasmuch as He has given us
those instruments whereby we till the earth. Great is
God, inasmuch as He has given us hands, and swallow
ing, and a belly, and the power of growing secretly and
breathing while we sleep. These things
it were meet
that every one should praise, and should chant the greatest
and most divine hymn, inasmuch as He has given us the
faculty of understanding these things and of using the
proper way. What then ? Since the majority of you are
blinded, ought there not to be someone to fill this place,
and, on behalf of all, to sing the hymn to God? For
what else can I
do, an old lame man, than sing hymns
to God? If, indeed, I were a I
nightingale, would do
as a nightingale
if a
; swan, as a swan. But now I
am a rational being
it behoves me to sing of God.
;