Million Book Collection - The Fishers of Men Ministries

THE STANDING-GROUND OF PHILOSOPHY189whom word has come down to us before the time whenEpictetus is supposed to have spoken them. A singleStoic in the lifetime of Epictetns, by name Demetrius,had indeed won universal respect by the independenceand freedom of his life. Yet neither he, nor Diogenes,to whom Epictetus refers, represents the other featuresof this character, which are stamped with a divinemessenger's solicitude for his fellow-men, a sacredcharge committed to him from above which he mustexecute, an abnegation of self, and a sacrifice forothers of the dearest family relations. But on theother hand the Roman world for sixty years beforethese words are said to be uttered, for ninety yearsbefore they are published, had been sown by suchteachers, who carried their lives in their hands, fearingneither emperor nor consul ; who proclaimed themselvesto be messengers, to be stewards, to be heraldsof God ; who claimed to inspect the lives and thoughtsof those whom they taught, to treat the men as brethren,the women as daughters, who abstained from marriage,because " no man being a soldier to God entanglethhimself with secular business." Two of such menEpictetus in his youth, when a slave in the house ofEpaphroditus, had known to have disregarded all theterrors of a tyrant, had known them to have been theone crucified, the other beheaded, at Rome for theirteaching, and to have encountered this death simplyfor carrying out to the very life the portrait of ateacher which he has here drawn. Now it is singularthat the only passage in which Epictetus refers byname to Christians informs us that he was acquaintedwith this their heroism. "What,"1 he says, "makesthe tyrant terrible ? His guards and their swords.1 Epictetus, iv. 7.