Million Book Collection - The Fishers of Men Ministries

POWER OF THE GREEK PHILOSOPHY343of the vulgar worship. Philosophy, in fact, was attemptingits cure of souls upon the basis of human nature'sintrinsic strength, the force of free inquiry, and thisin complete severance from that foundation of tradition,custom, and public law on which the worship rested.Yet the philosopher himself frequented that worship.He was trying to do the work of religion, withoutbeing a priest in any sense of the word, nor did thepriest attempt the work of the philosopher. It wasnot only that they remained apart, and that troubledconsciences went to the philosopher and not to thepriest. There was likewise this, that the philosopherconsoled and instructed not by the hopes, the fears,the ordinances of religion, but by an esoteric teachingof his own quite at variance with the religion. Letus observe the two characters in Marcus Aurelius.He is the most profuse employer of the establishedrites and offerer of endless sacrifices so that the whiteoxen threatened to fail, not to say that he is officialPontifex Maximus of all the religions sanctioned bythe empire; but his philosophy, and that is the wholeinward man, stands quite apart from these. It is ahard Pantheism, an iron order of physical sequence,in which prayer and sacrifice are utterly unavailingand out of place. There is no harmony whateverbetween the philosophic communer with his soul andthe worshipper of the gods.The same contradiction belongs to Epictetus, toPlotinus, and to Porphyrius. No one of these philosophersstood aloof from the public worship: no oneof them frequented it with the belief of the un-philosophic vulgar mind. Their patronage of it, infact, was setting a new meaning on it which wasnothing better than a falsehood. Their frequenta-