s, in which their doctrines were first taught, owe
their origin to Zeno, who lived to a very great age, illustrious for
self-control, temperance, and the severest type of virtue, and at length,
in accordance with a favorite dogma and practice of his school, when he
found that he had before him only growing infirmity with no hope of
restoration, terminated his life by his own hand.

According to the Stoic philosophy, *virtue is the sole end of life*, and
virtue is the conformity of the will and conduct to universal nature.
Virtue alone is good; vice alone is evil; and whatever is neither virtue
nor vice is neither good nor evil in itself, but is to be sought or
shunned, according as it is auxiliary to virtue or conducive to vice,--if
neither, to be regarded with utter indifference. Virtue is indivisible. It
does not admit of degrees. He who only approximates to virtue, however
closely, is yet to be regarded as outside of its pale. Only the wise man
can be virtuous. He needs no precepts of duty. His intuitions are always
to be trusted. His sense of right cannot be blinded or misled. As for
those who do not occupy this high philosophic ground, though they cannot
be really virtuous, they yet may present some show and semblance of
virtue, and they may be aided in this by precepts and ethical
instruction.(20) It was for the benefit of those who, on account of their
lack of true wisdom, needed such direction, and were at the same time so
well disposed as to receive and follow it, that treatises on practical
morality were written by many of the later Stoics, and that in Rome there
were teachers of this school who exercised functions closely analogous to
those of the Christian preacher and pastor.

Stoicism found *its most congenial soil* in the stern, hardy integrity and
patriotism of those Romans, whose incorruptible virtue is the one
redeeming feature of the declining days of the Republic and the effeminacy
and coarse depravity of the Empire. Seneca's ethical writings(21) are
almost Christian, not only in their faithful rebuke of every form of
wrong, but in their tender humanity for the poor, the slaves, the victims
of oppression, in their universal philanthropy, and in their precepts of
patience under suffering, forbearance, forgiveness, and returning good for
evil. Epictetus, the deformed slave of a capricious and cruel master,
beaten and crippled in mere wantonness, enfranchised in his latter years,
only to be driven into