mood of welcome, which may fill any place on the
scale between cheerful serenity and enthusiastic gladness, has taken
its place.

It makes a tremendous emotional and practical difference to one whether
one accept the universe in the drab discolored way of stoic resignation
to necessity, or with the passionate happiness of Christian saints.
The difference is as great as that between passivity and activity, as
that between the defensive and the aggressive mood. Gradual as are the
steps by which an individual may grow from one state into the other,
many as are the intermediate stages which different individuals
represent, yet when you place the typical extremes beside each other
for comparison, you feel that two discontinuous psychological universes
confront you, and that in passing from one to the other a "critical
point" has been overcome.

If we compare stoic with Christian ejaculations we see much more than a
difference of doctrine; rather is it a difference of emotional mood
that parts them. When Marcus Aurelius reflects on the eternal reason
that has ordered things, there is a frosty chill about his words which
you rarely find in a Jewish, and never in a Christian piece of
religious writing. The universe is "accepted" by all these writers;
but how devoid of passion or exultation the spirit of the Roman Emperor
is! Compare his fine sentence: "If gods care not for me or my
children, here is a reason for it," with Job's cry: "Though he slay
me, yet will I trust in him!" and you immediately see the difference I
mean. The anima mundi, to whose disposal of his own personal destiny
the Stoic consents, is there to be respected and submitted to, but the
Christian God is there to be loved; and the difference of emotional
atmosphere is like that between an arctic climate and the tropics,
though the outcome in the way of accepting actual conditions
uncomplainingly may seem in abstract terms to be much the same.

"It is a man's duty," says Marcus Aurelius, "to comfort himself and
wait for the natural dissolution, and not to be vexed, but to find
refreshment solely in these thoughts--first that nothing will happen to
me which is not conformable to the nature of the universe; and secondly
that I need do nothing contrary to the God and deity within me; for
there is no man who can compel me to transgress. He is an abscess on
the universe who withdraws and separates himself from the reason of our
common nature, through bei