It has been common to construct pictures of the state of morals in the first centuries of the Christian era from the statements of satirists who, like all satirists, had a large element of caricature, and from the denunciations of the Christian apologists, which, like all denunciations, have a large element of exaggeration. The pictures so constructed are mosaics of singular vices, and they have led to the not unnatural impression that those centuries constituted an era of exceptional wickedness. It is no doubt difficult to gauge the average morality of any age. It is questionable whether the average morality of civilized ages has largely varied: it is possible that if the satirists of our own time were equally outspoken, the vices of ancient Rome might be found to have a parallel in modern London; and it is probable, not on merely à priori grounds, but from the nature of the evidence which remains, that there was in ancient Rome, as there is in modern London, a preponderating mass of those who loved their children and their homes, who were good neighbours and faithful friends, who conscientiously discharged their civil duties, and were in all the current senses of the word “moral” men.[230]

It has also been common to frame statements of the moral philosophy which dominated in those centuries, entirely from the data afforded by earlier writers, and to account for the existence of nobler elements in contemporary writers by the hypothesis that Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius, had come into contact with Christian teachers. In the case of Seneca, the belief in such contact went so far as to induce a writer in an imitative age to produce a series of letters which are still commonly printed at the end of his works, and which purport to be a correspondence between him and St. Paul. It is difficult, no doubt, to prove the negative proposition that such writers did not come into contact with Christianity; but a strong presumption against the idea that such contact, if it existed, influenced to any considerable extent their ethical principles, is established by the demonstrable fact that those principles form an integral part of their whole philosophical system, and that their system is in close logical and historical connection with that of their philosophical predecessors.[231]

It will be found on a closer examination that the age in which Christianity grew was in reality an age of moral reformation. There was the growth of a higher religious morality, which believed that God was pleased by moral action rather than by sacrifice.[232] There was the growth of a belief that life requires amendment.[233] There was a reaction in the popular mind against the vices of the great centres of population. This is especially seen in the large multiplication of religious guilds, in which purity of life was a condition of membership: it prepared the minds of men to receive Christian teaching, and forms not the least important among the causes which led to the rapid dissemination of that teaching: it affected the development of Christianity in that the members of the religious guilds who did so accept Christian teaching, brought over with them into the Christian communities many of the practices of their guilds and of the conceptions which lay beneath them. The philosophical phase of the reformation began on the confines of Stoicism and Cynicism. For Cynicism had revived. It had almost faded into insignificance after Zeno and Chrysippus had formed its nobler elements into a new system, and left only its “dog-bark”[234] and its squalor. But when the philosophical descendants of Zeno and Chrysippus had become fashionable littérateurs, and had sunk independence of thought and practice in a respectability and “worldly conformity” which the more earnest men felt to be intolerable, Cynicism revived, or rather the earlier and better Stoicism revived, to re-assert the paramount importance of moral conduct, and to protest against the unnatural alliance between philosophy and the fashionable world.

It is to this moral reformation within the philosophical sphere that I wish especially to draw your attention. Its chief preacher was Epictetus. He was ranked among the Stoics; but his portrait of an ideal philosopher is the portrait of a Cynic.[235] In him, whether he be called Stoic or Cynic, the ethics of the ancient world find at once their loftiest expression and their most complete realization: and it will be an advantage, instead of endeavouring to construct a composite and comprehensive picture from all the available materials, to limit our view mainly to what Epictetus says, and, as far as possible, to let his sermons speak for themselves.

The reformation affected chiefly two points: (1) the place of ethics in relation to philosophy and life; (2) the contents of ethical teaching.

1. The Stoics of the later Republic and of the age of the Cæsars had come to give their chief attention to logic and literature. The study of ethics was no longer supreme; and it had changed its character. Logic, which in the systems of Zeno and Chrysippus had been only its servant, was becoming its master: it was both usurping its place and turning it into casuistry. The study of literature, of what the great masters of philosophy had taught, was superseding the moral practice which such study was intended to help and foster. The Stoics of the time could construct ingenious fallacies and compose elegant moral discourses; but they were ceasing to regard the actual “living according to nature” as the main object of their lives. The revival of Cynicism was a re-assertion of the supremacy of ethics over logic, and of conduct over literary knowledge. It was at first crude and repulsive. If the Stoics were “the preachers of the salon,” the Cynics were “the preachers of the street.”[236] They were the mendicant friars of imperial times. They were earnest, but they were squalid. The earnestness was of the essence, the squalor was accidental. The former was absorbed by Stoicism and gave it a new impulse: the latter dropped off as an excrescence when Cynicism was tested by time. Epictetus was not carried as far as the Cynics were in the reaction against Logic. The Cynics would have postponed the study of it indefinitely. Moral reformation is more pressing, they said.[237] Epictetus holds to the necessity of the study of Logic as a prophylactic against the deceitfulness of arguments and the plausibility of language. But he deprecates the exaggerated importance which had come to be attached to it. The students of his day were giving an altogether disproportionate attention to the weaving of fallacious arguments and the mere setting of traps to catch men in their speech. He would restore Logic to its original subordination. Neither it nor the whole dogmatic philosophy of which it was the instrument was of value in itself. And moreover, whatever might be the place of such knowledge in an abstract system and in an ideal world, it was impossible to disregard the actual conditions of the world as it is. The state of human nature is such, that to linger upon the threshold of philosophy is to induce a moral torpor. The student who aims at shaping his reason into harmony with nature has to begin, not with unformed and plastic material, which he can fashion to his will by systematic rules of art, but with his nature as it is shaped already, almost beyond possibility of unshaping, by pernicious habits, and beguiling associations of ideas, and false opinions about good and evil. While you are teaching him logic and physics, the very evils which it is his object to remedy will be gathering fresh strength. The old familiar names of “good” and “evil,” with all the false ideas which they suggest, will be giving birth at every moment to mistaken judgments and wrong actions, to all the false pleasures and false pains which it is the very purpose of philosophy to destroy. He must begin, as he must end, with practice. He must accept precepts and act upon them before he learns the theory of them. His progress in philosophy must be measured by his progress, not in knowledge, but in moral conduct.

This view, which Epictetus preaches again and again with passionate fervour, will be best stated in his own words:[238]

This new or revived conception of philosophy as the science of human conduct, as having for its purpose the actual reformation of mankind, had already led to the view that in the present state of human nature the study and practice of it required special kinds of effort. It was not only the science but also the art of life.[239] It formed, as such, no exception to the rule that all arts require systematic and habitual training. Just as the training of the muscles which is necessary to perfect bodily development is effected by giving them one by one an artificial and for the time an exaggerated exercise, so the training of the moral powers was effected, not by reading the rules and committing them to memory, but by giving them a similarly artificial and exaggerated exercise. A kind of moral gymnastic was necessary. The aim of it was to bring the passions under the control of reason, and to bring the will into harmony with the will of God.

(1) This special discipline of life was designated by the term which was in use for bodily training, askesis (ἄσκησις).[240] It is frequently used in this relation in Philo. He distinguishes three elements in the process of attaining goodness—nature, learning, discipline.[241] He distinguishes those who discipline themselves in wisdom by means of actual works, from those who have only a literary and intellectual knowledge of it.[242] He holds that the greatest and most numerous blessings that a man can have come from the gymnastic of moral efforts.[243] Its elements are “reading, meditation, reformation, the memory of noble ideals, self-restraint, the active practice of duties:”[244] in another passage he adds to these prayer, and the recognition of the indifference of things that are indifferent.[245] In the second century, when the idea of moral reformation had taken a stronger hold, this moral discipline was evidently carried out under systematic rules. It was not left to a student’s option. He must undergo hardships, drinking water rather than wine, sleeping on the ground rather than on a bed; and sometimes even subjecting himself to austerities, being scourged and bound with chains. There was sometimes no ostentation of endurance. Marcus Aurelius says that he owed it to Rusticus that he did not show off with a striking display either his acts of benevolence or his moral exercises.[246] “If you drink water,” says Epictetus in his Student’s Manual,[247] “don’t take every opportunity of saying, I drink water.... And if you resolve to exercise yourself in toil and hardship, do it for yourself alone, and not for the world outside. Don’t embrace statues (in public, to cool yourself); but if ever your thirst become extreme, fill your mouth with cold water and put it out again—and tell no one.” Epictetus himself preferred that men should be disciplined, not by bodily hardships, but by the voluntary repression of desire. The true “ascetic” is he who disciplines himself against all the suggestions of evil desire:[248] “an object of desire comes into sight: wait, poor soul; do not straightway be carried off your feet by it: consider, the contest is great, the task is divine; it is for kingship, for freedom, for calm, for undisturbedness. Think of God: call Him to be your helper and to stand by your side, as sailors call upon Castor and Pollux in a storm: for yours is a storm, the greatest of all storms, the storm of strong suggestions that sweep reason away.” In a similar way Lucian’s friend Nigrinus condemns those who endeavour to fashion young men to virtue by great bodily hardships rather than by a mingled discipline of body and mind: and Lucian himself says that he knew of some who had died under the excessive strain.[249]

This moral gymnastic, it was thought, was often best practised away from a man’s old associations. Consequently some philosophers advised their students to leave home and study elsewhere. They went into “retreat,” either in another city or in solitude. Against this also there was a reaction. In a forcible oration on the subject, Dio Chrysostom argues, as a modern Protestant might argue, against the monastic system.[250] “Cœlum non animum mutant,” he says, in effect, when they go from city to city. Everywhere a man will find the same hindrances both within and without: he will be only like a sick man changing from one bed to another. The true discipline is to live in a crowd and not heed its noise, to train the soul to follow reason without swerving, and not to “retreat” from that which seems to be the immediate duty before us.

The extent to which moral discipline and the system of “retreats” went on is uncertain, because they soon blended, as we shall see, with Christianity, and flowed with it in a single stream.

(2) But out of the ideas which they expressed, and the ideals which they held forth, there grew up a class of men which has never since died out, who devoted themselves “both by their preaching and living” to the moral reformation of mankind. Individual philosophers had had imitators, and Pythagoras had founded an ascetic school, but neither the one nor the other had filled a large place in contemporary society. With the revived conception of philosophy as necessarily involving practice, it was necessary that those who professed philosophy should be marked out from the perverted and degenerate world around them, in their outer as well as in their inner life. “The life of one who practises philosophy,” says Dio Chrysostom, “is different from that of the mass of men: the very dress of such a one is different from that of ordinary men, and his bed and exercise and baths and all the rest of his living. A man who in none of these respects differs from the rest must be put down as one of them, though he declare and profess that he is a philosopher before all Athens or Megara or in the presence of the Lacedæmonian kings.”[251]

The distinction was marked in two chief ways:

(1) A philosopher let his beard grow, like the old Spartans. It was a protest against the elaborate attention to the person which marked the fashionable society of the time.

(2) A philosopher wore a coarse blanket, usually as his only dress. It was at once a protest against the prevalent luxury in dress and the badge of his profession. “Whenever,” says Dio Chrysostom, “people see one in a philosopher’s dress, they consider that he is thus equipped not as a sailor or a shepherd, but with a view to men, to warn them and rebuke them, and to give not one of them any whit of flattery nor to spare any one of them, but, on the contrary, to reform them as far as he possibly can by talking to them and to show them who they are.”[252]

The frequency with which this new class of moral reformers is mentioned in the literature of the time shows the large place which it filled.

2. The moral reformation affected the contents of ethical teaching chiefly by raising them from the sphere of moral philosophy to that of religion. In Epictetus there are two planes of ethical teaching. The one is that of orthodox and traditional Stoicism: in the other, Stoicism is transformed by the help of religious conceptions, and the forces which led to the practice of it receive the enormous impulse which comes from the religious emotions. The one is summed up in the maxim, Follow Nature; the other in the maxim, Follow God.

On the lower plane the purpose of philosophy is stated in various ways, each of which expresses the same fact. It is the bringing of the will into harmony with nature. It consists in making the “dealing with ideas” what it should be, that is, in dealing with them according to nature.[253] It is the thorough study of the conceptions of good and evil, and the right application of them to particular objects.[254] It is the endeavour to make the will unthwarted in its action,[255] to take sorrow and disappointment out of a man’s life,[256] and to change its disturbed torrent into a calm and steady stream. The result of the practice of philosophy is happiness.[257] The means of attaining that result are marked out by the constitution of human nature itself and the circumstances which surround it. That nature manifests itself in two forms, desires to have or not to have, efforts to do or not to do.[258] The one is stimulated by the presentation to the mind of an object which is judged to be “good,” the other by that of one which is judged to be “fitting.” The one mainly concerns the individual man in himself, the other concerns him in his relations with other men. The “state according to nature” of desire is that in which it never fails of gratification, the corresponding state of effort is that in which it never fails of its mark. Both the one and the other are determined by landmarks which nature itself has set in the circumstances that surround us. The natural limits of desire are those things that are in our power: the direction of effort is determined by our natural relations.

For example:[259]

This view of right moral conduct as being determined by the natural relations in which one man stands to another, and as constituting what is Fitting in regard to those relations, had overspread the Roman world. But in that world the philosophical theory which lay behind the conception of the Fitting was less prominent than the conception itself, and two other terms, both of which were natural and familiar to the Roman mind, came into use to express it. The one was borrowed from the idea of the functions which men have to discharge in the organization of civil government, the other from the idea of a debt. The former of these, “officium,” has not passed in this sense outside the Latin language: the latter, “debitum,” is familiar to us under its English form “duty.”

On the higher plane of his teaching Epictetus expresses moral philosophy in terms of theology. Human life begins and ends in God. Moral conduct is a sublime religion. I will ask you to listen to a short cento of passages, strung loosely together, in which his teaching is expressed:—

Between the current ethics of the Greek world and the ethics of the earliest forms of Christianity were many points both of difference and of contact.

The main point of difference was that Christianity rested morality on a divine command. It took over the fundamental idea of the Jewish theocracy.[292] Its ultimate appeal was not to the reasonableness of the moral law in itself, but to the fact that God had enacted it. Greek morality, on the contrary, was “independent.” The idea that the moral laws are laws of God is, no doubt, found in the Stoics; but they are so in another than either the Jewish or the Christian sense: they are laws of God, not as being expressions of His personal will, but as being laws of nature, part of the whole constitution of the world.

Consequent upon the conception of the moral law as a positive enactment of God, the breach of moral law was conceived as sin. Into the early Christian conception of sin several elements entered. It was probably not in the popular mind what it was in the mind of St. Paul, still less what it became in the mind of St. Augustine. But one element was constant. It was a trespass against God. As such, it was on the one hand something for which God must be appeased, and on the other hand something which He could forgive. To the Stoics it was shortcoming, failure, and loss: the chief sufferer was the man himself: amendment was possible for the future, but there was no forgiveness for the past.

Beyond these and other points of difference there was a wide area of agreement. The former became accentuated as time went on: it was by virtue of the latter that in the earliest ages the minds of many persons had been predisposed to accept Christianity, and that, having accepted it, they tended to fuse some elements of the new teaching with some elements of the old. The agreement is most conspicuous in those respects which were the chief aims of the contemporary moral reformation; and above all in the importance which was attached to moral conduct. This importance was overshadowed in the later Christian communities by the importance which came to be attached to doctrine: its existence in the earliest communities is shown by two classes of proofs.

1. The first of these proofs is the place which moral conduct holds in the earliest Christian writers. The documents which deal with the Christian life are almost wholly moral. They enforce the ancient code of the Ten Words. They raise those Ten Words from being the lowest and most necessary level of a legal code, to being the expression of the highest moral ideal, expanding and amplifying them so as to make them embrace thoughts and desires as well as words and actions. The most interesting of such documents is that which is known as the “Two Ways.”[293] It has recently acquired a fresh significance by having been found as part of the Teaching of the Apostles. It is there prefixed to the regulations for ceremonial and discipline which constitute the new part of that work. It proves to be a manual of instruction to be taught to those who were to be admitted as members of a Christian community. It may thus be considered to express the current ideal of Christian practice. In the “Way of Life” which it sets forth, doctrine has no place. It is summed up in the two commandments: “First, thou shalt love God who made thee; secondly, thy neighbour as thyself: whatsoever things thou wouldest not have done to thyself, do not thou to another.”[294] These commandments are amplified in the spirit of the Sermon on the Mount. “Thou shalt not forswear thyself: thou shalt not bear false witness: thou shalt not speak evil: thou shalt not bear malice: thou shalt not be double-minded nor double-tongued, for double-tonguedness is a snare of death. Thy speech shall not be false or hollow, but filled to the full with deed. Thou shalt not be covetous, nor rapacious, nor a hypocrite, nor evilly disposed, nor haughty: thou shalt not take mischievous counsel against thy neighbour. Thou shalt not hate any man, but some thou shalt rebuke, and for some thou shalt pray, and some thou shalt love more than thine own soul.[295]... My child, be not a murmurer, for murmuring is on the path to blasphemy: nor self-willed nor evil-minded, for from all these things blasphemies are born. But be thou meek, for the meek shall inherit the earth: be long-suffering, and pitiful, and guileless, and quiet, and kind, and trembling continually at the words which thou hast heard.[296]... Thou shalt not hesitate to give, nor in giving shalt thou murmur; for thou shalt know who is the good paymaster of what thou hast earned. Thou shalt not turn away him that needeth, but thou shalt share all things with thy brother and shalt not say that they are thine own; for if ye be fellow-sharers in that which is immortal, how much more in mortal things.”[297]

Another such document is the first book of the collection known as the Apostolical Constitutions: it begins at once with an exhortation to morality.

“Listen to holy teaching, ye who lay hold on His promise, in accordance with the command of the Saviour, in harmony with his glorious utterances. Take heed, ye sons of God, to do all things so as to be obedient to God and to be well-pleasing in all things to the Lord our God. For if any one follow after wickedness and do things contrary to the will of God, such a one will be counted as a nation that transgresses against God. Abstain then from all covetousness and unrighteousness.”[298]

2. The second proof is afforded by the place which discipline held in contemporary Christian life. The Christians were drawn together into communities. Isolation was discouraged and soon passed away. To be a Christian was to be a member of a community. The basis of the community was not only a common belief, but also a common practice. It was the task of the community as an organization to keep itself pure. The offences against which it had to guard were not only the open crimes which fell within the cognizance of public law, but also and more especially sins of moral conduct and of the inner life. The qualifications which in later times were the ideal standard for church officers, were also in the earliest times the ideal standard for ordinary members. “If any man who has sinned sees the bishop and the deacons free from fault, and the flock abiding pure, first of all he will not venture to enter into the assembly of God, being smitten by his own conscience: but if, secondly, setting lightly by his sin he should venture to enter, he will forthwith be taken to task ... and either be punished, or being admonished by the pastor will be drawn to repentance. For looking round upon the assembly one by one, and finding no blemish either in the bishop or in the ranks of the people under him, with shame and many tears he will go out in peace, pricked in heart, and the flock will have been cleansed, and he will cry with tears to God and will repent of his sin, and will have hope: and the whole flock beholding his tears will be admonished that he who has sinned and repented is not lost.”[299] In other cases expulsion was a solemn and formal act: the sinful member was cast into outer darkness: re-admission was accompanied with the same rites as the original admission. In other words, the earliest communities endeavoured, both in the theory which they embodied in their manuals of Christian life, and in the practice which they enforced by discipline, to realize what has since been known as the Puritan ideal. Each one of them was a community of saints. “Passing their days upon earth, they were in reality citizens of heaven.”[300] The earthly community reflected in all but its glory and its everlastingness the life of the “new Jerusalem.” Its bishop was the visible representative of Jesus Christ himself sitting on the throne of heaven, with the white-robed elders round him: its members were the “elect,” the “holy ones,” the “saved.” “Without were the dogs, and the sorcerers, and the murderers, and the idolators, and every one that loveth and maketh a lie:” within were “they which were written in the Lamb’s book of life.” To be a member of the community was to be in reality, and not merely in conception, a child of God and heir of everlasting salvation: to be excluded from the community was to pass again into the outer darkness, the realm of Satan and eternal death.

Over these earliest communities and the theory which they embodied there passed, in the last half of the second century and the first half of the third, an enormous change. The processes of the change and its immediate causes are obscure. The interests of contemporary writers are so absorbed with the struggles for soundness of doctrine, as to leave but little room for a record of the struggles for purity of life. In the last stages of those struggles, the party which endeavoured to preserve the ancient ideal was treated as schismatical. The aggregate of visible communities was no longer identical with the number of those who should be saved. The dominant party framed a new theory of the Church as a corpus permixtum, and found support for it in the Gospels themselves. Morality became subordinated to belief in Christianity by the same inevitable drift by which practice had been superseded by theory in Stoicism.

In both the production of this change and its further developments Greece played an important part. The net result of the active forces which it brought to bear upon Christianity was, that the attention of a majority of Christian men was turned to the intellectual as distinguished from the moral element in Christian life. And when the change was effected, it operated in two further ways, which have survived in large and varied forms to the present day.

1. The idea of moral reformation had from the first seized different men with a varying tenacity of grasp.[301] There were some men who had a higher moral ideal than others: there were some whose natures were stronger: there were some to whom moral life was not the perfection of human citizenship, but the struggle of the spirit to disentangle itself from its material environment, and to rise by contemplation to fellowship with God. There are proofs of the existence in the very earliest Christian communities of those who endeavoured to live on a higher plane than their fellows. Abstinence from marriage and from animal food were urged and practised as “counsels of perfection.” In some communities there was an attempt to make such counsels of perfection obligatory. In the majority of communities, though they were part of “the whole yoke of the Lord,”[302] and were specially enjoined at certain times upon all church members, they were not of universal or constant obligation. Those who habitually practised them were recognized as a church within the Church. The practice of them was known by a name which we have seen to be common in the Greek philosophical schools. It was relative to the conception of life as an athletic contest. It was that of bodily training or gymnastic exercise (ἄσκησις).[303]

The secession of the Puritan party left much of this element still within the great body of confederated communities. At the end of the third century it became important both within them and without. It was increased, partly by the growing influence of the ideas which found their highest expression outside Christianity in Neo-Platonism; partly by the growing complexity of society itself, the strain and the despair of an age of decadence; partly also by the necessity of finding a new outlet, when Christianity became a legal religion, for the passionate love of God which had led men to a sometimes ecstatic martyrdom. It was joined by the parallel tendency among professors of philosophy. It soon took a new form. Hitherto those who followed counsels of perfection lived in ordinary society, undistinguished except by their conduct from their fellow-men. The ideal “Gnostic” of Clement of Alexandria takes his part in ordinary human affairs, “acting the drama of life which God has given him to play, knowing both what is to be done and what is to be endured.”[304] But early in the fourth century the practice of the ascetic life in Christianity came to be shown in the same outward way, but with a more marked emphasis, as the similar practice in philosophy. It was indeed known as philosophy.[305] It was most akin to Cynicism, with which it had sometimes already been confused, and its badges were the badges of Cynicism, the rough blanket and the unshorn hair. To wear the blanket and to let the hair grow was to profess divine philosophy, the higher life of self-discipline and sanctity. It was to claim to stand on a higher level and to be working out a nobler ideal than average Christians. The practice soon received a further development. Just as ordinary philosophers had sometimes found life in society to be intolerable and had gone into “retreat,” so the Christian philosophers began to withdraw altogether from the world, and to live their lives of self-discipline and contemplation in solitude. The retention of the old names shows the continuity of the practice. They were still practising discipline, ἄσκησις, or philosophy, φιλοσοφία. So far as they retired from society, they were still said “to go into retreat,” ἀναχωρεῖν, whence the current appellation of ἀναχωρηταί, “anchorets.” The place of their retreat was a “school of discipline,” ἀσκητήριον, or a “place for reflection,” φροντιστήριον.[306] To these were soon added the new names which were relative to the fact that moral discipline was usually practised in solitude. Those who retired from the world were “solitaries,” μοναχοί, and the place of their retirement was a “place for solitude,” μοναστήριον. When the practice was once firmly rooted in Christian soil, it was largely developed in independent ways for which Greece was not primarily responsible, and which therefore cannot properly be described here; but the independence and enormous overgrowth of these later forms cannot wipe away the memory of the fact that to Greece, more than to any other factor, was due the place and earliest conception of that sublime individualism which centred all a man’s efforts on the development of his spiritual life, and withdrew him from his fellow-men in order to bring him near to God.

2. It was inevitable that when the Puritan party had left the main body, and when the most spiritually-minded of those who remained detached themselves from the common life of their brethren, there should be a deterioration in the average moral conceptions of the Christian Churches. It was also inevitable that those conceptions should be largely shaped by Greek influences. The Pauline ethics vanished from the Christian world. For the average members of the churches were now the average citizens of the empire, educated by Greek methods, impregnated with the dominant ethical ideas. They accepted Christian ideas, but without the enthusiasm which made them a transforming force. As in regard to metaphysics, so also in regard to ethics, the frame of mind which had been formed by education was stronger than the new ideas which it absorbed. The current ideals remained, slightly raised: the current rules of conduct continued, with modifications. Instead of the conceptions of righteousness and holiness, there was the old conception of virtue: instead of the code of morals which was “briefly comprehended in this saying, namely, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself,” there was the old enumeration of duties. At the end of the fourth century the new state of things was formally recognized by ecclesiastical writers. Love was no more “the hand-book of divine philosophy:”[307] the chief contemporary theologian of the West, Ambrose of Milan, formulated the current theory in a book which is the more important because it not merely expresses the ideas of his time and seals the proof of their prevalence, but also became the basis of the moral philosophy of the Middle Ages. But the book is less Christian than Stoical.[308] It is a rechauffée of the book which Cicero had compiled more than three centuries before, chiefly from Panætius. It is Stoical, not only in conception, but also in detail. It makes virtue the highest good. It makes the hope of the life to come a subsidiary and not a primary motive. Its ideal of life is happiness: it holds that a happy life is a life according to nature, that it is realized by virtue, and that it is capable of being realized here on earth. Its virtues are the ancient virtues of wisdom and justice, courage and temperance. It tinges each of them with a Christian, or at least with a Theistic colouring; but the conception of each of them remains what it had been to the Greek moralists. Wisdom, for example, is Greek wisdom, with the addition that no man can be wise who is ignorant of God: justice is Greek justice, with the addition that its subsidiary form of beneficence is helped by the Christian society.

The victory of Greek ethics was complete. While Christianity was being transformed into a system of doctrines, the Stoical jurists at the imperial court were slowly elaborating a system of personal rights. The ethics of the Sermon on the Mount, which the earliest Christian communities endeavoured to carry into practice, have been transmuted by the slow alchemy of history into the ethics of Roman law. The basis of Christian society is not Christian, but Roman and Stoical. A fusion of the Roman conception of rights with the Stoical conception of relations involving reciprocal actions, is in possession of practically the whole field of civilized society. The transmutation is so complete that the modern question is not so much whether the ethics of the Sermon on the Mount are practicable, as whether, if practicable, they would be desirable. The socialistic theories which formulate in modern language and justify by modern conceptions such an exhortation as “Sell that thou hast and give to the poor,” meet with no less opposition within than without the Christian societies. The conversion of the Church to Christian theory must precede the conversion of the world to Christian practice. But meanwhile there is working in Christianity the same higher morality which worked in the ancient world, and the maxim, Follow God, belongs to a plane on which Epictetus and Thomas à Kempis meet.