and ever and
anon, amid his lonely musings, he pauses to write down the pure and holy
thoughts which shall better enable him, even in a Roman palace, even on
barbarian battlefields, daily to tolerate the meanness and the
malignity of the men around him; daily to amend his own shortcomings,
and, as the sun of earthly life begins to set, daily to draw nearer and
nearer to the Eternal Light. And when I thus think of him, I know not
whether the whole of heathen antiquity, out of its gallery of stately
and royal figures, can furnish a nobler, or purer, or more lovable
picture than that of this crowned philosopher and laurelled hero, who
was yet one of the humblest and one of the most enlightened of all
ancient "Seekers after God."

CONCLUSION.

A sceptical writer has observed, with something like a sneer, that the
noblest utterances of Gospel morality may be paralleled from the
writings of heathen philosophers. The sneer is pointless, and Christian
moralists have spontaneously drawn attention to the fact. In this
volume, so far from trying to conceal that it is so, I have taken
pleasure in placing side by side the words of Apostles and of
Philosophers. The divine origin of Christianity does not rest on its
morality alone. By the aid of the light which was within them, by
deciphering the law written on their own consciences, however much its
letters may have been obliterated or dimmed, Plato, and Cicero, and
Seneca, and Epictetus, and Aurelius were enabled to grasp and to
enunciate a multitude of great and memorable truths; yet they themselves
would have been the first to admit the wavering uncertainty of their
hopes and speculations, and the absolute necessity of a further
illumination. So strong did that necessity appear to some of the wisest
among them, that Socrates ventures in express words to prophesy the
future advent of some heaven-sent Guide.[70] Those who imagine that
_without_ a written revelation it would have been possible to learn all
that is necessary for man's well-being, are speaking in direct
contradiction of the greatest heathen teachers, in contradiction even of
those very teachers to whose writing they point as the proof of their
assertion. Augustine was expressing a very deep conviction when he said
that in Plato and in Cicero he met with many utterances which were
beautiful and wise, but among them all he never found, "Come unto me,
all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will refresh you."