ter is
nothing else but _steady love of good, and steady scorn of evil_....
Only to those who have the heart to say, 'We can do without selfish
enjoyment: it is not what we ask or desire,' is there no secret. Man
will have what he desires, and will find what is really best for him,
exactly as he honestly seeks for it. _Happiness may fly away, pleasure
pall or cease to be obtainable, wealth decay, friends fail or prove
unkind; but the power to serve God never fails, and the love of Him is
never rejected_."

CHAPTER III.

LIFE AND VIEWS OF EPICTETUS (_continued._)

Of the life of Epictetus, as distinct from his opinions, there is
unfortunately little more to be told. The life of

"That halting slave, who in Nicopolis
Taught Arrian, when Vespasian's brutal son
Cleared Rome of what most shamed him,"

is not an eventful life, and the conditions which surrounded it are very
circumscribed. Great men, it has been observed, have often the shortest
biographies; their real life is in their books.

At some period of his life, but how or when we do not know, Epictetus
was manumitted by his master, and was henceforward regarded by the world
as free. Probably the change made little or no difference in his life.
If it saved him from a certain amount of brutality, if it gave him more
uninterrupted leisure, it probably did not in the slightest degree
modify the hardships of his existence, and may have caused him some
little anxiety as to the means of procuring the necessaries of life. He,
of all men, would have attached the least importance to the external
conditions under which he lived; he always regarded them as falling
under the category of things which lay beyond the sphere of his own
influence, and therefore as things with which he had nothing to do. Even
in his most oppressed days, he considered himself, by the grace of
heaven, to be more free--free in a far truer and higher sense--than
thousands of those who owed allegiance to no master's will. Whether he
had saved any small sum of money, or whether his needs were supplied by
the many who loved and honoured him, we do not know. He was a man who
was content with the barest necessaries of life, and we may be sure that
he would have refused to be indebted to any one for more than these.

It is probable that he never married. This may have been due to that
shade of indifference to the female character of which we detect traces
here and there in his writi