swer that it _tended_ towards good, was
good in possibility, would be absolutely good when the full attainment
came, and the straining after right had been swallowed up in the
perfect calm of settled virtue.

'How also of the wise man tormented by pain, or in hunger and poverty
and rags, is his perfectness of wisdom and goodness really sufficient
to make him happy?' Here, again, the answer had to be hesitating and
provisional, through no fault of the Stoics. In this world, while we
are still under the strange dominion of time and circumstance, the
ideal can never wholly fit the real. There must still be difficulty
and incompleteness here, only to be solved and perfected 'when iniquity
shall have an end.' Our eyes may fail with looking upward, yet the
upward look is well; and the jibes upon the Stoic 'king in rags' that
Horace and others were so fond of, do not affect the question. It may
have been, and probably often was, the case that Stoic teachers {240}
were apt to transfer to themselves personally the ideal attributes,
which they justly assigned to the ideal man in whom wisdom was
perfected. The doctrine gave much scope for cant and mental pride and
hypocrisy, as every ideal doctrine does, including the Christian. But
the existence of these vices in individuals no more affected the
doctrine of an ideal goodness in its Stoic form, than it does now in
its Christian one. That only the good man is truly wise or free or
happy; that vice, however lavishly it surround itself with luxury and
ease and power, is inherently wretched and foolish and slavish;--these
are things which are worth saying and worth believing, things, indeed,
which the world dare not and cannot permanently disbelieve, however
difficult or even impossible it may be to mark men off into two
classes, the good and the bad, however strange the irony of
circumstance which so often shows the wicked who 'are not troubled as
other men, neither are they plagued like other men; they have more than
their heart could wish,' while good men battle with adversity, often in
vain. Still will the permanent, fruitful, progressive faith of man
'look to the end'; still will the ideal be powerful to plead for the
painful right, and spoil, even in the tasting, the pleasant wrong.

The doctrine, of course, like every doctrine worth anything, was pushed
to extravagant lengths, and {241} thrust into inappropriate quarters,
by foolish doctrinaires. As that the wise man