Million Book Collection - The Fishers of Men Ministries

NEOSTOICISM AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH 7 3practice is nothing rare in human life. But what isso rare as to be perhaps without a single other exampleof it, is that such a man's moral standard of judgmentshould rise in a whole system of teaching on certainpoints of great importance far above the standard ofall who had preceded him, however great their genius,and however consistent their life was with their pre- "cepts. Yet Seneca in proceeding from the joint possessionof reason by all men to the conclusion thatthere is an universal brotherhood of all men, who,whatever their nation and their outward condition,have a right to be treated with kindliness, sympathy,and forbearance, was far outstripping his predecessors.Again, when, with the severest exercise of slaverybefore his eyes, and when slavery formed the indispensablecondition of the empire's existence, he termedthe meanest slave fellow-man, friend, and even fellow-slave, and denounced cruelty inflicted on such an oneas a wrong to humanity, he was using a languagehitherto unknown. In all this he was doing whathad never been done by Socrates, or Plato, or Aristotle,or Cicero, or any other Greek or Eoman writer beforehim : what neither the Plinies nor Tacitus reachedafter him. If it be said that this is but a deductionfrom Zeno's fundamental view about men, it is a deductionwhich the Stoics for more than three hundredyears had not made. . He presents with the maturityof a consistent system doctrine of which a scatteredseed may be found here and there in preceding writers.In fact his whole temper of mind and his whole bodyof teaching on the above entire range of subjects havea softness, a tenderness even about them, equallyalien from what had hitherto been the temper of Stoicphilosophy and from the Roman character at all times.