Million Book Collection - The Fishers of Men Ministries

THE STANDING-GROUND OF PHILOSOPHY 193belong to each other, who, as Epictetus expresses it,all have God for their father, and therefore arebrethren, was first followed out by the Stoics of thisage to its full range, and to its last consequence."This very important and pregnant fact is not onlystated by this writer, but admitted by the most ablehistorians of Greek philosophy. Some who admitit maintain that this consequence lay in the conceptionof Stoicism from its beginning, and was producedby its own power. They have to show whya philosophy which existed for three hundred yearsbefore our Lord came, never produced these fruitsuntil after these doctrines had been preached by Hisdisciples on the ground of His example, and at thecost of their lives, through the length and breadthof the empire. They have to show why Cicero, withall the stores of Grecian thought before him, andregarding philosophy as the guide of life, never producedsuch a view of * the teacher as we have justquoted from Epictetus. They should further showwhy his view of slavery is the hard cold view of Platoand Aristotle, without a glimpse of the tendernessfor the rights of human nature, which appears inSeneca and Epictetus, and the subsequent school. Itis a fact that in the interval the great sacrifice onCalvary had taken place, and the Creator of man haddied upon the cross the death of a Roman slave.Before the slave Epictetus obtained honour as a philosopher,the slave Onesimus had become a bishop inthe Church. efore the character of the teacher hadbeen sketched by the Stoic, all its fine and exaltedpoints had been exhibited during two generationsin the settled order of the Church's missionaries.The reasoned unbelief of modern infidels - who layVOL. III. N