Million Book Collection - The Fishers of Men Ministries

THE NEOPLATONIC PHILOSOPHY AND EPOCH 3 I 3few years intercepted by the bars of its fleshly prisoshould presently rejoin the universal Mind. It is bjust and logical that a god who has no being of hown should be incapable of creatinThe culminating point in such a system is, as wehave seen, such a conception as the imaginary Apol-lonius or the ideal Pythagoras. Every good man isod : specially such men as these in whom the soulasserts its original and inherent power, lives accordingto its nature, restores harmony in the being over whichi \ presides, and works for the restoration of the sameharmony in the commonwealth of man, and in thewhole universe. We have seen in the romance ofApollonius how far a tacit imitation of the life andconduct of Christ could be carried upon this entirelynatural basis. Upon it likewise lamblichus attributedto his Pythagoras the formation of a societywhich was the exact counterpart of the ChristianChurch. In both these instances we may trace theworkings of minds which saw the Christian Church inoperation before them, profoundly admired the work,but wished to transfer it to their own hereditarystanding-ground.Both these authors can speak, as Stoics had spokenbefore them, of the unity of the human race, of thebrotherhood of man with man, even how man, as Epic-tetus had said, is a " son of God," how all gradationsof human rank vanish before that divine equality, howan emperor is less than a wise man. All this unityof the human race rested upon the common possessionof the divine intelligence within it.But if in a few choice minds such as Seneca, Epic-tetus, Marcus Aurelius, or Plotinus, such a conceptionserved for the basis of many kindly thoughts con-