essential excellence of
human nature, and very few doubted the possibility of man acquiring by
his own will a high degree of virtue.

The doctrine of suicide was the culminating point of Roman stoicism. The
proud, self-reliant, unbending character of the philosopher, could only
be sustained when he felt that he had a sure refuge against the extreme
forms of suffering or of despair. Although virtue is not a mere creature
of interest, no great system has ever yet flourished which did not
present an ideal of happiness as well as an ideal of duty. Stoicism
taught men to hope little, but to fear nothing. It did not array death
in brilliant colours, as the path to positive felicity, but it
endeavoured to divest it, as the end of suffering, of every terror. Life
lost much of its bitterness when men had found a refuge from the storms
of fate, a speedy deliverance from dotage and pain. Death ceased to be
terrible when it was regarded rather as a remedy than as a sentence.
Life and death in the stoical system were attuned to the same key. The
deification of human virtue, the total absence of all sense of sin, the
proud stubborn will that deemed humiliation the worst of stains,
appeared alike in each. The type of its own kind was perfect. All the
virtues and all the majesty that accompany human pride, when developed
to the highest point, and directed to the noblest ends, were here
displayed. All those which accompany humility and self-abasement were
absent.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 74: From Chapter II, Vol. I, of "History of European Morals,"
1869. The author's foot-notes have been omitted.]

THE ENTHUSIASM OF HUMANITY[75]

JOHN ROBERT SEELEY

The first method of training this passion which Christ employed was the
direct one of making it a point of duty to feel it. To love one's
neighbour as oneself was, he said, the first and greatest _law_. And in
the Sermon on the Mount he requires the passion to be felt in such
strength as to include those whom we have most reason to hate--our
enemies and those who maliciously injure us--and delivers an imperative
precept, "Love your enemies."

It has been shown that to do this is not, as might at first appear, in
the nature of things impossible, but the further question suggests
itself, Can it be done to order? Has the verb to love really an
imperative mood? Certainly, to say that we can love at pleasure, and by
a mere effort of will summon up a passion which does not arise of