rriage is right and honourable in other men, but its entanglements,
its expenses, its distractions, would render impossible a life devoted
to the service of heaven.

"Nor will he mingle in the affairs of any commonwealth: his commonwealth
is not Athens or Corinth, but mankind.

"In person he should be strong, and robust, and hale, and in spite of
his indigence always clean and attractive. Tact and intelligence, and a
power of swift repartee, are necessary to him. His conscience must be
clear as the sun. He must sleep purely, and wake still more purely. To
abuse and insult he must be as insensible as a stone, and he must place
all fears and desires beneath his feet. To be a Cynic is to be this:
before you attempt it deliberate well, and see whether by the help of
God you are capable of achieving it."

I have given a sketch of the doctrines of this lofty chapter, but fully
to enjoy its morality and eloquence the reader should study it entire,
and observe its generous impatience, its noble ardour, its vivid
interrogations, "in which," says M. Martha, "one feels as it were a
frenzy of virtue and of piety, and in which the plenitude of a great
heart tumultuously precipitates a torrent of holy thoughts."

Epictetus was not a Christian. He has only once alluded to the
Christians in his works, and there it is under the opprobrious title of
"Galileans," who practised a kind of insensibility in painful
circumstances and an indifference to worldly interests which Epictetus
unjustly sets down to "mere habit." Unhappily it was not granted to
these heathen philosophers in any true sense to know what Christianity
was. They ignorantly thought that it was an attempt to imitate the
results of philosophy, without having passed through the necessary
discipline. They viewed it with suspicion, they treated it with
injustice. And yet in Christianity, and in Christianity alone, they
would have found an ideal which would have surpassed their loftiest
conceptions. Nor was it only an impossible _ideal_; it was an ideal
rendered attainable by the impressive sanction of the highest authority,
and one which supported men to bear the difficulties of life with
fortitude, with peacefulness, and even with an inward joy; it ennobled
their faculties without overstraining them; it enabled them to
disregard the burden of present trials, not by vainly attempting to deny
their bitterness or ignore their weight, but in the high certainty that
they are the