Million Book Collection - The Fishers of Men Ministries

THE GOSPEL OF PHILOSOPHIC HEATHENISM259like a continuous record of events, and especially ofthe action which the Roman State exerted upon theChristian Church. Thus the brief reference of Pliny,as the governor of a province, to the Emperor Trajan,respecting the Christians with whom he had to deal,illuminates, as it were, a whole period which is darkfrom the absence of authentic information. But forthis, modern " scepticism would probably have deniedthat Trajan persecuted at all. In like manner theRomance of Philostratus, entirely worthless as history,f the utmost value as revealing to us the state ofmind among learned and reflecting heathens in thfirst half of the third century, and how great wthe change which had passed over society since thetime of Seneca. All the preceding tendencies whichwe have been following since the rise of the Neopythagorean school are fully developed in the Apolloniuof Philostratus. With regard to the bearing of philosophy upon religion, we may take as three stages, thseveral positions of Seneca, of Plutarch, and of Philostratus. Seneca's god, if we can say that he has aris nature or reason. " He utterly scorns the existingworship; he considers prayer useless, he has no notionof reconciling philosophy with the worship of thgods. His Stoic doctrine would be the complete subversion of that worship, for not only does he reducethe multiplicity of its objects to unity, but his notionthe god within him is incompatible with piety orreligion at all. A man cannot be pious to himselNot such is the mind, and still less such the heart cPlutarch. He, too, holds a unity of the godhead, butone by which all the ancestral and traditional deitieshave sunk into subordinate parts of the chief God,while they retain their own rites and worship. PrayerLIBRARY ST. MARY'S COLLEGE