Million Book Collection - The Fishers of Men Ministries

THE FOKMATION OF CHRISTENDOMhis famous verse, " More dear to them than to himselfis man." This sedulous worshipper of the old godshas likewise blent together the best parts of Platonicand Stoic theory in a passage which represents thedivine unity, the gift of reason proceeding from thecommon nature of man, and the reciprocal duties ofmen to each other derived from this common origin." This marks our birth,The great distinction from the beasts of earth.And therefore gifted with superior powersAnd capable of things divine, 'trs oursTo learn and practise every useful art,And from high heaven deduce that better part,That nu>ral sense, denied to creatures proneAnd downward bent, and found with man alone.For he who gave this vast machine to rollreathed life in them, in us a reasoning soul,That kindred feelings might our state improve,And mutual wants conduct to mutual love." 1Here Juvenal in one of his happier moments breathesa sense of the dignity of man's destiny which is farabove the moral tone of his three contemporaries, forthey may be said to be heathen of the old block. Thecurrents which have reached the Greek mind haveslightly touched them. Not that even Trajan,the unliterary soldier, and much less the philosophichistorian and the well-read man of letters, were ignorantof the theories which we find in Epictetus andPlutarch and Dio. They knew of them doubtless : thelistened to them. They would themselves be auditorsof many philosophic lectures at Rome, or Athens, orAlexandria: but they reckoned philosophy a Greekscience, just as before and after them even Romanswho philosophised wrote in Greek. Such were Cor-1 Sat. xv. 142-150. Gifford's translation.