Million Book Collection - The Fishers of Men Ministries

FOUNDATION OF THE ROMAN CHURCH 29proper to religion, and Zeno, passing at a bound thelimits of states and nations, conceived the race of manas a flock in one pasture feeding on a common law,the law of reason. If we go on from the conceptionto its realisation, we find that Zeno too established aschool: and as the many were foolish, and the fewonly in progress towards wisdom, his school was to becomposed of such proficients. Now, although theStoic was sometimes driven to confess that a wiseman had never yet been found, as a matter of fact thestrongest and most earnest natures among the Greeksand Romans during the three centuries which followedhis teaching down to the time of Claudius were attractedby that elaborate system of duty-the subordinationof the individual to the universal reason-drawn out in Stoic morality.What then is the common effect of philosophy asseen in these four examples of Pythagoras, Plato,Aristotle, and Zeno, and their several systems ? Certainlythe powers of the human mind cannot beexpected to rise higher than in the three formerinstances, nor the steadfastness of human purpose toexceed the fourth. What had been the result uponhuman society ? So much as this. A few mindshere and there out of the mass had been affected.Such minds accepted and professed certain tenets : itcan hardly be said that they conformed their lives andactions to the tenets. Pythagoras, indeed, attemptedto form a body of men so acting, but his society wasdissolved. The Stoics afterwards approached nearestin their system to the attainment of a practical end,but, not to say that the profession was severed fromthe practice, the professors of Stoicism remained singleand isolated. No such thing as a Platonic, Peripatetic,