were by perplexities and
dangers, were yet enabled to reflect, as from the dim surface of silver,
some image of what was divine and true; we hail, with the great and
eloquent Bossuet, "THE CHRISTIANITY OF NATURE." "The divine image in
man," says St. Bernard, "may be burned, but it cannot be burnt out."

And this is the pleasantest side on which to consider the life and the
writings of Seneca. It is true that his style partakes of the defects of
his age, that the brilliancy of his rhetoric does not always compensate
for the defectiveness of his reasoning; that he resembles, not a mirror
which clearly reflects the truth, but "a glass fantastically cut into a
thousand spangles;" that side by side with great moral truths we
sometimes find his worst errors, contradictions, and paradoxes; that his
eloquent utterances about God often degenerate into a vague Pantheism;
and that even on the doctrine of immortality his hold is too slight to
save him from waverings and contradictions;[51] yet as a moral teacher
he is full of real greatness, and was often far in advance of the
general opinion of his age. Few men have written more finely, or with
more evident sincerity, about truth and courage, about the essential
equality of man,[52] about the duty of kindness and consideration to
slaves,[53] about tenderness even in dealing with sinners,[54] about the
glory of unselfishness,[55] about the great idea of humanity[56] as
something which transcends all the natural and artificial prejudices of
country and of caste. Many of his writings are Pagan sermons and moral
essays of the best and highest type. The style, as Quintilian says,
"abounds in delightful faults," but the strain of sentiment is never
otherwise than high and true.

[Footnote 51: Consol. ad Polyb. 27; Ad Helv. 17; Ad Marc. 24, _seqq_.]

[Footnote 52: Ep. 32; De Benef. iii. 2.]

[Footnote 53: De Ira, iii. 29, 32.]

[Footnote 54: Ibid. i. 14; De Vit. beat. 24.]

[Footnote 55: Ep. 55, 9.]

[Footnote 56: Ibid. 28; De Oti Sapientis, 31.]

He is to be regarded rather as a wealthy, eminent, and successful Roman,
who devoted most of his leisure to moral philosophy, than as a real
philosopher by habit and profession. And in this point of view his very
inconsistencies have their charm, as illustrating his ardent, impulsive,
imaginative temperament. He was no apathetic, self-contained, impassible
Stoic, but a passionate, warm-hearted man, who could break into a flood
of unre