mainly of little things, rarely illumined by flashes of great heroism,
rarely broken by great dangers, or demanding great exertions. A moral
system, to govern society, must accommodate itself to common characters
and mingled motives. It must be capable of influencing natures that can
never rise to an heroic level. It must tincture, modify, and mitigate
where it cannot eradicate or transform. In Christianity there are always
a few persons seeking by continual and painful efforts to reverse or
extinguish the ordinary feelings of humanity, but in the great majority
of cases the influence of the religious principle upon the mind, though
very real, is not of a nature to cause any serious strain or struggle.
It is displayed in a certain acquired spontaneity of impulse. It softens
the character, purifies and directs the imagination, blends insensibly
with the habitual modes of thought, and, without revolutionising, gives
a tone and bias to all the forms of action. But stoicism was simply a
school of heroes. It recognised no gradations of virtue or vice. It
condemned all emotions, all spontaneity, all mingled motives, all the
principles, feelings, and impulses upon which the virtue of common men
mainly depends. It was capable of acting only on moral natures that were
strung to the highest tension, and it was therefore naturally rejected
by the multitude.

The central conception of this philosophy of self-control was the
dignity of man. Pride, which looks within, making man seek his own
approbation, as distinguished from vanity, which looks without, and
shapes its conduct according to the opinions of others, was not only
permitted in stoicism, it was its leading moral agent. The sense of
virtue, as I have elsewhere observed, occupies in this system much the
same place as the sense of sin in Christianity. Sin, in the conception
of the ancients, was simply disease, and they deemed it the part of a
wise man to correct it, but not to dwell upon its circumstances. In the
many disquisitions which Epictetus and others have left us concerning
the proper frame of mind in which man should approach death, repentance
for past sin has absolutely no place, nor do the ancients appear to have
ever realised the purifying and spiritualising influence it exercises
upon the character. And while the reality of moral disease was fully
recognised, while an ideal of lofty and indeed unattainable excellence
was continually proposed, no one doubted the