The idealism and the pessimism of the earlier Stoics were alike fatal to any effort of moral reform. The cold, flawless perfection of the man of triumphant reason was an impossible model which could only discourage and repel aspirants to the higher life. The ghastly moral wreck of ordinary human nature, in which not a single germ of virtuous impulse seemed to have survived the ruin, left apparently no hope of rescue or escape. If morals were to be anything but an abstract theory, if they were to have any bearing on the actual character and destiny of man, their demand must be modified. And so in many essential points it was, even before Seneca.1686 The ideal contempt for all external things had to give way to an Aristotelian recognition of the value of some of them for a virtuous life. And Seneca is sometimes a follower of Aristotle, as in the admission, so convenient to the millionaire, that wealth may be used by the wise man for higher moral ends.1687 He will not be the slave of money; he will be its master. He will admit it to his home, but not to his heart, as a thing which may take to itself wings at any moment, but which may meanwhile be used to cheer and warm him in his struggles, and may be dispensed in beneficent help to dependents. In the same way, beside the ideal of perfect conformity to the law of reason, there appeared a class of conditional duties. To conform absolutely to the law of reason, to realise the highest good through virtue, remains the highest Stoic ideal. But if, beside the highest good, it is permitted to attach a certain value to some among the external objects of desire, manifestly a whole class of varying duties arises in the field of choice and avoidance.1688 And again the ideal of imperturbable calm, which approached the apathy of the Cynics, was softened by the admission of rational dispositions of feeling.1689 These concessions to im[pg 315]perious facts of human life, of course, modified the awful moral antithesis of wise and foolish, good and reprobate. Where is the perfectly wise man, with his single moral purpose, his unruffled serenity, his full assurance of his own impregnable strength, actually to be found?1690 He is not to be discovered among the most devoted adherents of the true philosophic creed. Even a Socrates falls short of the sublime standard. If we seek for the wise man in the fabulous past, we shall find only heroic force, or a blissful, untempted ignorance, which are alike wanting in the first essential of virtue.1691 As the perfect ideal of moral wisdom, imperturbable, assured, and indefectible, receded to remote ideal distances, so the condemnation of all moral states below an impossible perfection to indiscriminate reprobacy1692 had to be revoked. Seneca maintains that men are all bad, but he is forced to admit that they are not all equally bad, nay, that there are men who, although not quite emancipated from the snares of the world and the flesh, have reached various stages on the upward way. He even distinguishes three classes of proficientes, of persons on the path of moral progress.1693 There is the man who has conquered many serious vices, but is still captive to others. Again, there is the man who has got rid of the worst faults and passions, but who is not secure against a relapse. There is a third class who have almost reached the goal. They have achieved the great moral victory; they have embraced the one true object of desire; they are safe from any chance of falling away; but they want the final gift of full assurance reserved for the truly wise.1694 They have not attained to the crowning glory of conscious strength. Seneca is still in bondage to the hard Stoic tradition, in spite of his aberrations from it. The great Catholic virtue of humility is to him still, theoretically at least, a disqualification for the highest spiritual rank.

And yet Seneca is far from wanting in humility. In giving counsels of perfection, he candidly confesses that he is himself far from the ideal.1695 Indeed, his Letters reveal a character [pg 316]which, with lofty ideals, and energetic aspiration, is very far removed from the serene joy and peace of the true Stoic sage. He has not got the invulnerable panoply from which all the shafts of fortune glance aside. He shows again and again how deep a shadow the terror of his capricious master could cast over his life, how he can be disturbed even by the smaller troubles of existence, by the slights of great society, by the miseries of a sea voyage, or the noises of a bath.1696 In the counsels addressed to Lucilius, Seneca is probably quite as often preaching to himself. The ennui, the unsteadiness of moral purpose, the clinging to wealth and power, the haunting fears or timid anticipations of coming evil, for which he is constantly suggesting spiritual remedies, are diagnosed with such searching skill and vividness that we can hardly doubt that the physician has first practised his art upon himself.1697 Nor has he entire faith in his own insight or in the potency of the remedies which ancient wisdom has accumulated. The great difficulty is, that the moral patient, in proportion to the inveteracy of his disease, is unconscious of it.1698 Society, with its manifold temptations of wealth and luxury and irresponsible ease, can so overwhelm the congenital tendency to virtue,1699 that the inner monitor may be silenced, and a man may come to love his depravity.1700 If men are not getting better, they are inevitably getting worse. There is such a state, in the end, as hopeless, irreclaimable reprobacy. Yet even for the hoary sinner Seneca will not altogether despair, so long as there lingers in him some divine discontent, however faint, some lingering regret for a lost purity. He will not lose hope of converting even a mocker like Marcellinus, who amuses himself with jeers at the vices and inconsistencies of professing philosophers, and does not spare himself. Seneca may, perchance, give him a pause in his downward course.1701

Seneca’s gospel, as he preaches it, is for a limited class. With all his professed belief in the equality and brotherhood of men, Seneca addresses himself, through the aristocratic Epicurean Lucilius, to the slaves of wealth and the vices [pg 317]which it breeds. The men whom he wishes to save are masters of great households, living in stately palaces, and striving to escape from the weariness of satiety by visits to Baiae or Praeneste.1702 They are men who have awful secrets, and whose apparent tranquillity is constantly disturbed by vague terrors,1703 whose intellects are wasted on the vanities of a conventional culture or the logomachies of a barren dialectic.1704 They are people whose lives are a record of weak purpose and conflicting aims, and who are surprised by old age while they are still barely on the threshold of real moral life.1705 With no religious or philosophic faith, death is to such men the great terror, as closing for ever that life of the flesh which has been at once so pleasant and so tormenting.1706 In dealing with such people, Seneca recognises the need both of the great principles of right living and of particular precepts, adapted to varieties of character and circumstance. The true and solid foundation of conduct must always be the clear perception of moral truth, giving birth to rightly-directed purpose and supplying the right motive. For example, without a true conception of God as a spirit, worship will be gross and anthropomorphic.1707 The doctrine of the brotherhood of all men in the universal commonwealth is the only solid ground of the social charities and of humanity to slaves. Yet dogma is not enough; discipline must be added. The moral director has to deal with very imperfect moral states, some of quite rudimentary growth, and his disciples may have to be treated as boys learning to write, whose fingers the master must guide mechanically across the tablet.1708 The latent goodness of humanity must be disencumbered of the load which, through untold ages, corrupt society has heaped upon it. The delusions of the world and the senses must be exposed, the judgment, confused and dazzled by their glamour, must be cleared and steadied, the weak must be encouraged, the slothful and backsliding must be aroused to continuous effort in habitual converse with some good man who has trodden the same paths before.1709 [pg 318]Thus the great “Ars Vitae,” founded on a few simple principles of reason, developed into a most complicated system of casuistry and spiritual direction. How far it was successful we cannot pretend to say. But the thoughtful reader of Seneca’s Letters cannot help coming to the conclusion that, even in the reign of Nero, there must have been many of the proficientes, of candidates for the full Stoic faith. If Seneca reveals the depths of depravity in his age, we are equally bound to believe that he represents, and is trying to stimulate, a great moral movement, a deep seated discontent with the hard, gross materialism, thinly veiled under dilettantism and spurious artistic sensibility, of which Nero was the type. Everything that we have of Seneca’s, except the Tragedies, deals with the problems or troubles of this moral life, and the demand for advice or consolation appears to have been urgent. Lucilius, the young Epicurean procurator, who has been immortalised by the Letters, is only one of a large class of spiritual inquirers. He not only lays his own moral difficulties before the master, but he brings other spiritual patients for advice.1710 There were evidently many trying to withdraw from the tyranny or temptations of high life, with a more or less stable resolution to devote themselves to reflection and amendment. It is a curious pagan counterpart to the Christian ascetic movement of the fourth and fifth centuries.1711 And, just as in the days of S. Jerome and S. Paulinus, the deserter from the ranks of fashion and pleasure in Nero’s time had to encounter a storm of ridicule and misrepresentation. Philosophic retreat was derided as mere languid self-indulgence, an unmanly shrinking from social duty, nay, even a mere mask for the secret vices which were, too often with truth, charged against the soi-disant philosopher.1712 Sometimes the wish to lead a higher life was openly assailed by a cynical Epicureanism. Virtue and philosophy were mere idle babble. The only happiness is to make the most of the senses while the senses still keep their fresh lust for pleasure. The days are fleeting away never to return in which we can drink with keen zest [pg 319]the joys of the flesh. What folly to spare a patrimony for a thankless heir!1713 Seneca had to deal with many souls wavering between the two ideals. One of his treatises is addressed to a kinsman, Annaeus Serenus, who had made a full confession of a vague unrest, an impotence of will, the conflict of moral torpor with high resolve.1714 In his better moments, Annaeus inclines to simplicity of life and self-restraint. Yet a visit to a great house dazzles him and disturbs his balance, with the sight of its troops of elegant slaves, its costly furniture and luxurious feasting. He is at one time drawn to philosophic quietude; at another he becomes the strenuous ambitious Roman of the old days, eager for the conflicts of the forum. He is always wavering between a conviction of the vanity of literary trifling and the passion for literary fame.1715 Cannot Seneca, to whom he owes his ideal, furnish some remedy for this constant tendency to relapse and indecision?

It is in the sympathetic handling of such cases, not in broad philosophic theory, that the peculiar strength of Seneca lies. His counsels were adapted to the particular difficulties presented to him. But many of them have a universal validity. He encourages the wish to retire into meditative quietude, but only as a means to moral cure.1716 Retreat should not be an ostentatious defiance of the opinion of the world.1717 Nor is it to be a mere cloak for timid or lazy shrinking from the burdens of life. You should withdraw from the strife and temptations of the mundane city, only to devote yourself to the business of the spiritual city, to cultivate self-knowledge and self-government, to inspire the soul with the contemplation of the Eternal and the Divine. Solitude may be a danger, unless a man lives in the presence of “One who seeth in secret,”1718 from whom no evil thought is hidden, to whom no prayer for evil things must be addressed.1719 And, lest the thought of God’s presence may not come home with sufficient [pg 320]urgency, Seneca recommends his disciples to call up the image of some good man or ancient sage, and live as if under his eye.1720 The first step in moral progress is self-knowledge and confession of one’s faults.1721 Ignorance of our spiritual disease, the doom of the indurated conscience, is the great danger, and may be the mark of a hopeless moral state. Hence the necessity for constant daily self-examination. In the quiet of each night we should review our conduct and feeling during the day, marking carefully where we have fallen short of the higher law, and strengthening ourselves with any signs of self-conquest. Seneca tells us that this was his own constant practice.1722 For progress is only slow and difficult. It requires watchful and unremitting effort to reach that assured and settled purpose which issues spontaneously in purity of thought and deed, and which raises man to the level of the Divine freedom. There must be no pauses of self-complacency until the work is done. There is no mediocrity in morals. There must be no halting and unsteadiness of purpose, no looking back to the deceitful things of the world. Inconstancy of the wavering will only shortens the span of this short life. How many there are who, even when treading the last stage to death, are only beginning to live, in the true sense, and who miss the beatitude of the man who, having mastered the great secret, can have no addition to his happiness from lengthened years. In the long tract of time any life is but a moment, and of that the least part by most men is really lived.1723 And this unsettled aim is liable to constant temptation from without. We are continually within sight and earshot of the isles of the Sirens, and only the resolution of a Ulysses will carry us past in safety.1724 In fact no isle of the Sirens can have been more dangerous than the life of a great household in the Neronian age, when the dainties and the vices of every land assailed the senses with multiplied seductions, and men craved in vain for a heightened and keener sensibility. Perpetual change of scene to the shores of Baiae, [pg 321]to Apulia, to some glen in the Apennines, or to the northern lakes, or even further, to the Rhone, the Nile, the Atlas, was sought by the jaded man of pleasure or the man struggling in vain to reform. But Seneca warns his disciple that wherever he may go he will take his vices and his weakness with him.1725 Let him try to work out his salvation within his great palace on the Esquiline. Surrounded by splendour and luxury, let him, for a time, isolate himself from them; let him lie on a hard bed, and live on scanty fare, and fancy himself reduced to that poverty which he dreads so much and so foolishly.1726 The change will be good for body and soul; and the temporary ascetic may return to his old life, at least released from one of his bugbears, and refreshed with a new sense of freedom.

Such were some of the precepts by which Seneca strove to fortify the struggling virtue of his disciples. But he never concealed from them that it is only by struggle that the remote ideal can be attained. “Vivere militare est.” And almost in the words of S. Paul, he uses the example of the gladiator or the athlete, to arouse the energy of the aspirant after moral perfection.1727 “They do it for a corruptible crown.”1728 The reward of the Stoic disciple is vain and poor to the gross materialist. But, from the serene heights, where ideal Reason watches the struggle, the only victor is the man who has adopted the watchwords—self-knowledge, renunciation, resignation. Only by following that steep path can any one ever reach the goal of assured peace within, and be delivered from the turmoil of chance and change. The misery of the sensual, the worldly, and the ambitious lies in the fact that they have staked their happiness on things which are beyond their own power, which are the casual gifts of fortune, and may be as capriciously withdrawn. This state is one of slavery to external things, and the pleasure, after all, which can be drawn from them is fleeting. Hence it is that the sensualist is equally miserable when his pleasures are denied, and when they are exhausted.1729 He places his happiness in one brief [pg 322]moment, with the danger or the certainty either of privation or satiety. The wise man of the Stoics, on the other hand, has built his house upon the rock. He shuns, according to the Pythagorean maxim, the ways of the multitude, and trusting to the illumination of divine Reason, he takes the narrow path.1730 His guiding light is the principle that the “kingdom of heaven is within,” that man’s supreme good depends only on himself, that is, on the unfettered choice of reason. To such a man “all things are his,” for all worth having is within him. His mind creates its own world, or rather it rediscovers a lost world which was once his. He can, if he will, annihilate the seductions of the flesh and the world, which cease to disturb when they are contemned. He may equally extinguish the griefs and external pains of life, for each man is miserable just as he thinks himself.1731 Human nature, even unfortified by philosophic teaching, has been found capable of bearing the extremity of torture with a smile. The man who has mastered the great secret that mind may, by its latent forces, create its own environment, should be able to show the endurance of a Scaevola or a Regulus.1732 All he needs to do is to unmask the objects of his dread.1733 For just as men are deluded by the show of material pleasure, so are they unmanned by visionary fears. Even the last event of life should have no terror for the wise man, on any rational theory of the future of the soul. The old mythical hell, the stone of Sisyphus, the wheel of Ixion, Cerberus, and the ghostly ferryman, may be dismissed to the limbo of fable.1734 For the man who has followed the inner light, death must either be a return to that antenatal calm of nothingness which has left no memory, or the entrance to a blissful vision of the Divine.1735 Even in this luxurious and effeminate time, men and women of all ranks and ages have shown themselves ready to escape from calamity or danger by a voluntary death.1736 And what after all is death? It is not the terminus of life, a single catastrophe of a moment. In the very hour of birth we enter on the first stage in the journey to the grave. We are dying daily, and our last day [pg 323]only completes the process of a life-long death.1737 And as to the shortness of our days, no life is short if it has been full.1738 The mass of men are only living in an ambiguous sense; they linger or vegetate in life, they do not really live. Nay, many are long since dead when the hour of so-called death arrives. And the men who mourn over the shortness of their days are the greatest prodigals of the one thing that can never be replaced.1739 In the longest life, on a rational estimate, how small a fraction is ever really lived! The whole past, which might be a sure and precious possession, is flung away by the eager, worldly man.1740 The fleeting present is lost in unrest or reckless procrastination, or in projecting ourselves into a future that may never come. Thus old age surprises us while we are mere children in moral growth.1741

At certain moments, the Stoic ideal might seem to be in danger of merging itself in the self-centred isolation of the Cynic, asserting the defiant independence of individual virtue, the nothingness of all external goods, the omnipotence of the solitary will. And undoubtedly, in the last resort, Seneca has pictured the wise man thus driven to bay, and calmly defying the rage of the tyrant, the caprices of fortune, the loss of health and wealth, nay the last extremity of torture and ignominious death. His own perilous position, and the prospect of society in the reign of Nero, might well lead a man of meditative turn so to prepare himself for a fate which was always imminent. But the Stoic doctor could never acquiesce in a mere negative ideal, the self-centred independence of the individual soul. He was too cultivated, he had drunk too deep of the science and philosophy of the past, he had too wide an outlook over the facts of human life and society, to relegate himself to a moral isolation which was apt to become a state of brutal disregard of the claims of social duty, and even of personal self-respect.1742 Such a position was absolutely impossible to a man like Seneca. Whatever his practice may have been, it is clear that in temperament he was almost too soft and emotional. He was a man with an [pg 324]intense craving for sympathy, and lavish of it to others; he was the last man in the world who could enjoy a solitary paradise of self-satisfied perfection. It is true the Roman world to the eyes of Seneca lay in the shadow of death, crushed under a treacherous despotism, and enervated by gross indulgence. Yet, although he sees men in this lurid light, he does not scorn or hate them. It was not for nothing that Seneca had been for five years the first minister of the Roman Empire. To have stood so near the master of the world, and felt the pulse of humanity from Britain to the Euphrates, to have listened to their complaints and tried to minister to their needs, was a rare education in social sympathy. It had a profound effect on M. Aurelius, and it had left its mark on Seneca.1743

Two competing tendencies may be traced in Stoicism, and in Seneca’s exposition of it. On the one hand, man must seek the harmony of his nature by submitting his passions and emotions to his own higher nature, and shaking himself free from all bondage to the flesh or the world. On the other hand, man is regarded as the subject of the universal Reason, a member of the universal commonwealth, whose maker and ruler is God.1744 The one view might make a man aim merely at isolated perfection; it might produce the philosophic monk. The other and broader conception of humanity would make man seek his perfection, not only in personal virtue, but in active sympathy with the movement of the world. The one impulse would end in a kind of spiritual selfishness. The other would seek for the full development of spiritual strength in the mutual aid and sympathy of struggling humanity, in friendship,1745 in the sense of a universal brotherhood and the fatherhood of God. There are two cities, says Seneca, in which a man may be enrolled—the great society of gods and men, wide as the courses of the sun; the other, the Athens or the Carthage to which we are assigned by the accident of birth.1746 A man may give himself to the service of both societies, or he may serve the one and neglect the other. The wise man alone realises to the full his citizenship in the spiritual commonwealth, in pondering on the problems of [pg 325]human conduct, the nature of the soul, of the universe and God, and conforming his moral being to the eternal law of Nature. The sage, a Zeno or a Chrysippus, may rightly devote himself exclusively to contemplation and moral self-culture.1747 He may not, by wealth and station, have access to the arena of active life. And, although a seeming recluse, he may really be a far greater benefactor of his kind than if he led the Senate, or commanded armies. There may be cases in which a man may be right in turning his back on public life, in order to concentrate all his energies on self-improvement. And Seneca does not hesitate to counsel Lucilius to withdraw himself from the thraldom of office.1748 Yet Zeno’s precept was that the wise man will serve the State unless there be some grave impediment in his way.1749 For, on Stoic principles, we are all members one of another, and bound to charity and mutual help. And all speculation and contemplation are vain and frivolous unless they issue in right action. Yet the practical difficulty for the sapiens was great, if not insuperable. What earthly commonwealth could he serve with consistency; is it an Athens, which condemned a Socrates to death, and drove an Aristotle into exile?1750 How please the vulgar sensual crowd without displeasing God and conscience? It might seem that the true disciple of Stoicism could not take a part in public life save under some ideal polity, such as Plato or Chrysippus dreamed of.1751 Here, as elsewhere, the problem was solved with varying degrees of consistency. The problem is stated by Seneca—“Se contentus est sapiens ad beate vivendum, non ad vivendum.”1752 It is the ever-recurring conflict between lofty idealism and the facts of human life, which is softened, if not solved, from age to age by casuistry. The wise and good man should have the springs of his happiness in himself. Yet a wise friend may call forth his powers, and furnish an object of self-sacrifice.1753 The wise man will not entangle himself in the cares of family life.1754 Yet wife and child are [pg 326]needed to give completeness to the life of the citizen. Since man exists for the general order, how can he avoid lending his services to the State, unless there be some insuperable bar? The controversy between the dream of solitary perfection and altruism was variously solved, and the particular solution could always be defended in the light of the great law of life. Epictetus, cut off from the great world by servile birth and poverty, could make light of marriage, of the begetting of future citizens, and the duties of political life.1755 On the other hand, M. Aurelius, by nature as detached as Epictetus, might refuse to follow the transcendental counsels of Chrysippus and Seneca. He might strive painfully to reconcile devotion to an irksome political charge with a dream of that unseen commonwealth “in which the cities of men are as it were houses.”1756

Yet in spite of these difficulties about public duty, no one outside the pale of Christianity has perhaps ever insisted so powerfully on the obligation to live for others, on the duty of love and forgiveness, as Seneca has done. We are all, bond or free, ruler or subject, members one of another, citizens of a universal commonwealth.1757 We have all within us a portion of the Divine spirit. No man can live entirely to himself.1758 If we are not doing good to others we are doing harm. The nature of man and the constitution of the universe make it a positive obligation to seek the welfare of our fellows.1759 The social instinct is innate and original in us. As man is flung upon the world at birth, or in the natural state, with all his immense possibilities as yet undeveloped, no creature is so helpless.1760 It was only by combination and mutual good offices that men were able to repel the dangers which surrounded the infancy of the race, and to conquer the forces of nature. Man is born for social union, which is cemented by concord, kindness, and love,1761 and he who shows anger, selfishness, perfidy, or cruelty to his fellows strikes at the [pg 327]roots of social life. Nor should the spectacle of universal depravity cause us to hate or despise our kind.1762 It is quite true that the mass of men are bad, and always will be bad, with only rare exceptions. If society is the source of many blessings, it is also a great corruptor, and the conquest of nature and the development of the arts have aroused insatiable passions which have darkened the eye of reason.1763 Yet this crowd of sinners are our brothers, with the germs of virtue in their grain. They have taken the broad way almost necessarily, because it is broad. A general may punish individual soldiers, but you must pardon an army when it deserts the standards. The truly wise, not knowing whether to laugh or weep, will look kindly on the erring masses, as sick men who need a physician.1764 And beside the few truly wise, who can cast the first stone? We are all more or less bad, we have all gone astray.1765 And yet we constantly show the utmost severity to the faults of others, while we forget or ignore our own.1766 Even as God is long-suffering to transgressors, and sends His rain upon the evil and good alike, so should we be merciful in judgment and lavish in beneficence.1767 The spectacle of universal greed and selfishness and ingratitude should not harden us against our fellows, but rather make us turn our eyes to our own faults.1768 Sometimes, indeed, the note of humility is absent, and Seneca is the serene sapiens contra mundum, or the proud Roman gentleman who will not demean himself to resent or even notice the insults or injuries of the spiteful crowd.1769 They will pass him by as the licensed jests of the slaves on the Saturnalia. He reminds himself that it is the lower air which is turbid with storm and thunder; the ether which spreads around the stars is never vexed and darkened by the tempest.1770 This is one of the recurring contrasts in Seneca between the moral tone of the old world and that of the great movement which was setting in. But the new prevails in the end. The conception of God as cold reason or impersonal law [pg 328]or fate gives way to the thought of a God who guides by His providence, who embraces all by His love, whose goodness is as boundless as His power, who is best worshipped by the imitation of His goodness.1771 As the vision grows, the pride of the invulnerable sapiens, who might make himself the equal or more than the equal of God,1772 shrinks and is abased. We are all more or less bad, and we should be gentle to one another.1773 Do we complain of coldness and ingratitude? Let us think how many a kindness done to us in early days, the tenderness of a nurse, a friend’s wise counsel or help in critical times, we have carelessly let slip from memory.1774 The faults which irritate us in another are often lurking in ourselves. Forgive if you wish for forgiveness; conquer evil with good; do good even to those who have wrought you evil.1775 Let us copy the serene example of those Eternal Powers who constantly load with their benefits even those who doubt of their existence, and bear with unruffled kindness the errors of frail souls that stumble by the way.

And as we shall not be harsh to those of our own external rank, so shall we soften the lot of those whom fortune has condemned to slavery. Even the slave is admitted to that great city of gods and men, which has no frontiers, which embraces all races and ranks, where all ranks should be levelled by the consciousness of a common Divine descent and a universal brotherhood of men.1776 The conquests of Macedon and Rome, overthrowing all old-world national barriers, had prepared the way for the greatest and most fruitful triumph of ancient philosophy. And the Stoic school has the glory of anticipating the diviner dream, yet far from realised, of a human brotherhood under the light from the Cross. Seneca has never risen higher, or swept farther into the future than in his treatment of slavery. He is far in advance of many a bishop or abbot or Christian baron of the middle age. Can a slave confer a benefit? he asks.1777 Is his service, however lavish, not merely a duty to his lord, which, as it springs [pg 329]from constraint, is undeserving of gratitude? Seneca repudiates the base suggestion with genuine warmth. On the same principle a subject cannot confer a benefit on his monarch, a simple soldier on his general. There is a limit beyond which power cannot command obedience. There is a line between cringing compliance and generous self-sacrifice. And the slave has often passed that limit. He has often borne wounds and death to save his master’s life in battle. He has often, in the years of the terror, endured the last extremity of torture, rather than betray his secrets.1778 The body of the slave is his master’s; his mind is his own.1779 It cannot be bought and sold. And in his inner soul, the slave is his master’s equal. He is capable of equal virtue and equal culture; nay, in both he may be his master’s superior. He can confer a benefit if he can suffer injury in the outrages which cruelty and lust inflict upon him. When he confers a benefit, he confers it as man upon man, as an equal in the great family whose Father is God.

Seneca gives a lurid picture of the corruption of women in the general licence of his age.1780 Yet he has a lofty ideal of what women might become. Like other Stoic preachers, it was his good fortune to be surrounded by good women from his infancy. He remembers the tenderness of his aunt, in whose arms he first entered Rome as a child, who nursed him through long sickness, and broke through her reserve to help him in his early career of ambition. Her blameless character escaped even the petulance of Alexandrian gossip.1781 His letters to his mother, Helvia, reveal a matron of the best Roman type—strong, self-denying, proud of her motherhood, and despising the extravagance and ostentation of her class. In spite of her father’s limited idea of female culture, she had educated herself in liberal studies, and found them a refuge in affliction.1782 Marcia was of a softer type, and gave way to excessive grief for a lost child. Yet it is to her that Seneca unfolds most fully his ideal of feminine character. He will not admit the inferior aptitude of women for virtue and culture.1783 [pg 330]Women have the same inner force, the same capacity for nobleness as men. The husband of Paulina who surrounded him with affectionate sympathy, and was prepared to die along with him, the man who had witnessed the stern courage and loving devotion of the wives of the Stoic martyrs, might well have a lofty ideal of woman’s character.1784 But to any true disciple of the Porch that ideal had a surer ground than any personal experience, however happy. The creed which Seneca held was at once a levelling and an elevating creed. It found the only nobility or claim to rank in higher capacity for virtue.1785 It embraced in the arms of its equal charity all human souls, bond or free, male or female, however they might be graded by convention or accident, who have a divine parentage, and may, if they will, have a lofty, perhaps an eternal future.

And now, in taking leave of Seneca, let us forget the fawning exile in Corsica, the possible lover of Julia or Agrippina, the millionaire minister of Nero, who was surrounded by a luxury and state which moved the envy of the tyrant.1786 Rather let us think of the ascetic from his early youth, who, raised by his talents to the highest place, had to reconcile an impossible ideal with the sordid or terrible realities of that rank which was at once a “pinnacle and a precipice.”1787 He was continually torn by the contrast between the ideal of a lofty Stoic creed and the facts of human life around him, between his own spiritual cravings and the temptations or the necessities of the opportunist statesman. He was imbued with principles of life which could be fully realised only in some Platonic Utopia; he had to deal with men as they were in the reign of Nero, as they are painted by Tacitus and Petronius. If he failed in the impossible task of such a reconciliation, let us do him the justice of recognising that he kept his vision clear, and that he has expounded a gospel of the higher life, which, with all its limitations from temperament or tradition, will be true for our remotest posterity, that he had a vision of the City of God.1788 He was not personally perhaps so pure and clear a soul as Plutarch or Aristides or Dion Chrysostom. But he [pg 331]had utterly cast off that heathen anthropomorphism which crossed and disturbed their highest visions of the Divine.1789 Seneca is far more modern and advanced than even the greatest of the Neo-Platonic school, just because he saw that the old theology was hopelessly effete. He could never have joined in the last struggle of philosophic paganism with the Church. And so the Church almost claimed him as her son, while it never dreamt of an affinity with Plutarch or Plotinus.

Indeed, there needed only the change of some phrases to reconcile the teaching of Seneca with that of the great ascetic Christian doctors. Many of the headings of the Imitation might be attached to paragraphs of Seneca—“of bearing with the faults of others”; “of inordinate affections”; “of the love of solitude and silence”; “of meditation on death”; “of humble submission”; “that to despise the world and serve God is sweet”; “of the acknowledgment of our own infirmities, and the remembrance of God’s benefits”; “of the contempt of temporal honour and vain secular knowledge”; “of the day of eternity and this life’s straitness.” In truth, the great spirits of all ages who have had a genius for religion, after due allowance for difference of association and difference of phrase, are strangely akin and harmonious. And Seneca had one great superiority over other equally religious souls of his time, which enables him to approach mediaeval and modern religious thought—he had broken absolutely with paganism. He started with belief in the God of the Stoic creed; he never mentions the Stoic theology which attempted to reconcile Him with the gods of the Pantheon. In spite of all his rhetoric, he tries to see the facts of human life and the relation of the human spirit to the Divine in the light of reason, with no intervening veil of legend. God is to Seneca the great Reality, however halting human speech may describe Him, as Fate, or Law, or Eternal Reason, or watchful loving Providence. God is within us, in whatever mysterious way, inspiring good resolves, giving strength in temptation, with all-seeing eye watching the issue of the struggle. God is without us, loading us with kindness [pg 332]even when we offend, chastising us in mercy, the goal of all speculation, He from whom we proceed, to whom we go at death. The true worship of Him is not in formal prayer and sacrifice, but in striving to know and imitate His infinite goodness. We mortal men in our brief life on earth may be citizens of two commonwealths, one the Rome or Corinth of our birth, the other that great city of gods and men, in which all are equally united, male and female, bond and free, as children of a common Father. In this ideal citizenship, in obedience to the law of the spiritual city, the eternal law which makes for righteousness, man attains his true freedom and final beatitude in communion with kindred souls.

Yet, as in mediaeval and puritan religious theory, there is in Seneca a strange conflict between pessimism and idealism. To the doomed philosophic statesman of the reign of Nero, the days of man’s life are few and evil. Life is but a moment in the tract of infinite age, and so darkened by manifold sins and sorrows that it seems, as it did to Sophocles, a sinister gift.1790 On the other hand, its shortness is a matter of no importance; the shortest life may be full and glad if it be dignified by effort and resignation and conformity to the great law of the universe. The wise and pious man, ever conscious of his brief time of probation, may brighten each passing day into a festival and lengthen it into a life. The shortness of a life is only an illusion, for long or short have no meaning when measured by the days of eternity. And the philosopher may unite many lives in one brief span. He may join himself to a company of sages who add their years to his, who counsel without bitterness, and praise without flattery; he may be adopted into a family whose wealth increases the more it is divided; in him all the ages may be combined in a single life.1791 To such a spirit death loses all its terrors. The eternal mystery indeed can be pierced only by imaginative hope. Death, we may be sure, however, can only be a change. It may be a passage into calm unconsciousness, as before our birth, which will release us from all the griefs and tumults of the life here below. It may, on the other hand, prove to be the morning of an eternal day, the entrance to a radiant and untroubled world of infinite possibilities. In any case, the spirit which [pg 333]has trained itself in obedience to eternal law, will not tremble at a fate which is surely reserved for the universe, by fire or flood or other cataclysmal change. The future in store for the soul is either to dwell for ever among things divine, or to sink back again into the general soul, and God shall be all in all.