iated; their conviction was of a Unity in all things, and to this
they consistently held in spite of constant and damaging criticism. The
theological result of this conviction has lately been well expressed by
Dr. Bussell.[779] He is speaking of Seneca in particular, but what he
says applies to all Stoics equally well: "Though he yearns to see God
in 'the moral order of the Universe,' he is forced in the interests of
Unity to identify Him with every other known force. As He is everything,
so any name will suit Him. He is the sum of existence: or the secret and
abstract law which guides it: He is Nature or Fate. The partial names of
special deities are all His, and together they make up the fulness of
the divine title; but _they disappear in the immense nothingness_,
rather than colour or qualify it." This is a point of immense importance
for the study of Stoicism at Rome; it was fully developed by Posidonius,
and copied from him both by Cicero and Varro. "God," says Cicero in the
book I have been quoting, "pervading all nature (_pertinens per naturam
cuiusque rei_), can be understood as Ceres on the land, as Neptune on
the sea, and so on, and may be and should be worshipped in all these
different forms;" not in superstitious fear and grovelling spirit--the
mental attitude which Lucretius had condemned years before this treatise
was written--but with pure heart and mind, following the one and true
God in all his various manifestations.[780] Thus the Stoic Pantheism, in
spite of its weak points, could find room for the deities of the
city-state, and put new illuminating life into them. To us it may seem,
as it seems to Dr. Bussell, that they would disappear in an immense
nothingness; but to the Roman mind of Scipio's age, if I am not
mistaken, they might, on the contrary, save the great Pantheistic idea
from so itself disappearing. I cannot but think that the Roman's idea of
divinity, the force or will-power which he called _numen_,[781] would
find here a means of reviving its former hold on the Roman mind, and
enabling it to grasp as a concrete fact, and not merely as an abstract
idea, the "deus pertinens per naturam cuiusque rei." In particular the
Roman conception of the great Jupiter, the father of heaven, might gain
new life for the people who had so long been used to call him "the Best
and Greatest." Almost from the very beginning of Stoicism the school had
seized upon Zeus to convey, under the guise of a personality a