Million Book Collection - The Fishers of Men Ministries

342 THE FORMATION OF CHRISTENDOMlessors of wisdom for acting upon the public opinionand the private practice of men.This being so, it becomes the more interesting toknow what they taught. Into this confidential situationall the philosophical sects entered. It is statedindeed even of the second century that the greaterpart of those who as Headers, Educators, and Companionslived in the houses of distinguished Pomans,followed the Kpicurean principles:1 but there werelikewise Stoics, Peripatetics, Cynics, Platonists, Eclectics,as afterwards Neoplatonists. Now these sectswaged a continual war with each other, a war carriedon with the most jealous bitterness, and offering tooutsiders the spectacle of irreconcilable contradictionseven in the first and most important questions. Ofthem Cicero had said in his own time concerningthe first question of all, the Being of God, " we arecompelled by the disagreement of the wise to beignorant ' of our own Lord and Kuler. We knownot whether we are subjects of the 'Sun or theEther."2The same remark might have been made of themall for three centuries onward down to Plotinus andPorphyrius. If, indeed, they had no common doctrine,still less had they any union of a society betweenthemselves. Not only was the Stoic not a Platonistor an Epicurean, but the Stoics and the Platonistshad no society of their own. They were all mereunits, each working by himself. But to completethe view of their situation we must bear in mindthe split between the inward conviction of the phisopher, whatever he might be, and his outward pract1 Tzschirner, Fall d< x Hcid< iithums, p. 15- Lucullus, v. 41.