The Stoic Creed - College of Stoic Philosophers

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60 THE STOIC CREED
His sons. 1 Thus the goodness, as well as the majesty
and might, of the supreme cause is recognized, and this
goodness is seen to operate through love. Moreover,
sin is set forth as disloyalty to an unseen Master, whose
eye is ever upon us, who knows our every thought, and
to whom we are in very truth responsible. The God
"with whom we have to do" becomes to the later
Stoics a living actuating presence, in many ways re
sembling the God of Hebrew and of New Testament
Scripture.
a rule of life is this,
of God were upon you ;
The motto that Seneca gives to Lucilius for
u So live among men, as if the eye
and so address yourself to God,
as if men heard your prayer (Ep. 10).
In the last place, the Cosmopolitanism of the Stoics
now attains a warmth and intensity that it did not
before possess. This arose from various causes (a)
from the spectacle before men s eyes of many diverse
nationalities and creeds united in one great Common
wealth, in the vast Roman Empire, thereby suggesting
to the imagination an Empire vaster still, and one more
homogeneous and complete, only needing to be inter
preted in the light of Christianity to yield the Civitas
Dei of St. Augustine ; (b] from the growth of the
theistic conception and, along with this, the vision of a
future life
beyond the grave, enforcing
the conviction
that, if there is a God, He must care for His children
and provide for their everlasting security, and if all
men are His children, thus precious to Him, none of
them should be despised by us here ; (c)
from the
corruption of the times, which sent forth the Stoics as
missionaries and moral preachers aglow, therefore,
1
See Epictetus, Diss, i. 9.