Million Book Collection - The Fishers of Men Ministries

44 THE FORMATION OF CHRISTENDOMreason acting in conjunction with the natural consciencecould it reach truth. It did not claim topossess any such gift as the Jew recognised in Mosesand the prophets, and the Christian found in theApostolic teaching. And so in it we find its physicalscience and its tholo made identical.Again, as to its morality, that likewise was theproduce of human reason. No doubt, indeed, in thiscase as in that of doctrine, the most self-reliant philosopherwas still influenced, and much more, perhaps,than he was conscious of, by precepts which hadcome down from the ancient religion. These coalescedin his mind with the judgments of the natural conscience.But so far forth as each philosophic systemhad a distinctive morality, it was formed by a processof reason working upon that supposed truth whichthe intellect had attained. Thus the three virtues ofPlato, prudence, fortitude, and temperance, were deducedfrom his triple division of the human being'sconstituents, and represented the three parts \\hich hederived severally from the divine mind, the world-soul,and matter. In a more remarkable instance therebe no doubt that Stoicism, whichb tli t as a in ked out itmorality as a strict deduction from it eption concerning God or Nature on the one hand and man onth th It involved th bject f t parttobut likewise an identitywitl it And f its moral it tintrinsic dignity of man as a rational being, not theacknowledgment that he was a creature. It seemsthen that the grand modern invention of independentmorality was entirely anticipated ^ by the Greek philo-sopher, not, however, as a thing desirable in itself,