Million Book Collection - The Fishers of Men Ministries

NEOSTOICISM AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH89character of man, and applies to the whole race thenoblest and most touching thought of the dramatist," Homo sum, human! nihil a me alienum puto,"the contraction, or rather, an unnatural severance oftheir view on another side is equally remarkable. Itis as though thay had gathered the countless myriadsf individual human destinies into one great channelf waters only to conduct it to a precipice whshall fall into an abyss, and be dissipated for ever.3r the existence of man after death, if continued soT as his intelligence is concerned, about which theirlanguage is confused and uncertain, is not the existenceof a personal agent rewarded or punishedat he has done. His intelligence, reunited to thdivine intelligence of which it was originally a pibecome universal, but the man who did well or ill,is extinct. Out of the city of gods and men, thcitizen has perished. A system of future reward andpunishment forms no part of Stoic morality ; entersther into their fears nor their hopes. They aret to fear or to hope about it. It accords withhis, that suicide, the open door, is for adequatcauses justified and commended, these causes beingwhen providence, that is, the course of the world,indicates to man by withdrawing from him themeans of living according to nature that it has nofurther need of him here. And finally this systemsumes an attitude of neutrality, or even of support,wards the established religion of Polytheism bydering its gods, how numerous soever, as magencies of the one divine force which rules theworld, as evolved from it, and to be reduced bacto it at each burning of the world. And so M