Million Book Collection - The Fishers of Men Ministries

THE FORMATION OF CHRISTENDOMm m, thou passest from embodied to disembodiedmind, and rejoinest that from which tl mestut th dividual m who h joyed d sor-w d. he d and feared, done well id doi , willt no long Such is the end of the self-sufficientf God ; the extinction of p ,1 bsistAnd thus it 1 h the St P hcism takup the popular Polytheism into itself. The derivedgods are to be distinguished from the primal divinebeing. Here, Athene, Apollo, and the rest do notoutlast the burning of the world, but are resolved intothe original primal force.l And this reason of man,thus extolled and prized, is so resolved, when the bodyof death, which he bears about with him, is broken up.Thus the belief in God and Providence, in the dignityof man by virtue of his reason, and his kinsmanshipwith God, is united with the doctrine of the " opendoor," that is, suicide. It exists with the restriction ofman's personal subsistence to this life, and with theadmission of a countless multitude of gods, whosenumber and " variety do not matter, since they areemanations of the one primal force, into which theyfall back again, as does the human soul, but somewhatlater.Epictetus the slave, as Musonius the knight, wasfaithful to his principles throughout his life. Let usproceed to another great Stoic, who in the highest ofall ranks showed a similar fidelity to his philosophy,the Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus.This disciple of Epictetus, born just as his masterwas leaving the world, reproduces exactly the views ofthat master as to the function which he assigns tophilosophy, as to the nature of the power ruling the1 Zeller, iv. 666.