ndom" their
oracular significance? Shall we be jealous of the ethical loftiness of
a Plato or an Aurelius? Shall we be loth to admit that some power of the
Spirit of Christ, even mid the dark wanderings of Seneca's life, kept
him still conscious of a nobler and a better way, or that some sweetness
of a divine hope inspired the depressions of Epictetus in his slavery?
Shall our eye be evil because God in His goodness granted the heathen
also to know such truths as enabled them "to overcome the allurements of
the visible and the terrors of the invisible world?" Yes, if we have of
the Christian Church so mean a conception that we look upon it as a mere
human society, "set up in the world to defend a certain religion against
a certain other religion." But if on the other hand we believe "that it
was _a society established by God as a witness for the true condition of
all human beings_, we shall rejoice to acknowledge its members to be
what they believed themselves to be,--confessors and martyrs for a truth
which they could not fully embrace or comprehend, but which, through
their lives and deaths, through the right and wrong acts, the true and
false words, of those who understand them least, was to manifest and
prove itself. Those who hold this conviction dare not conceal, or
misrepresent, or undervalue, any one of those weighty and memorable
sentences which are to be found in the _Meditation_ of Marcus Aurelius.
_If they did, they would be underrating a portion of that very truth
which the preachers of the Gospel were appointed to set forth_; they
would be adopting the error of the philosophical Emperor without his
excuse for it. Nor dare they pretend that the Christian teaching had
unconsciously imparted to him a portion of its own light while he seemed
to exclude it. They will believe that it was God's good pleasure that a
certain truth should be seized and apprehended by this age, and they
will see indications of what that truth was in the efforts of Plutarch
to understand the 'Daemon' which guided Socrates, in the courageous
language of Ignatius, in the bewildering dreams of the Gnostics, in the
eagerness of Justin Martyr to prove Christianity a philosophy ... in the
apprehension of Christian principles by Marcus Aurelius, and in his
hatred of the Christians. From every side they will derive evidence,
_that a doctrine and society which were meant for mankind cannot depend
upon, the partial views and apprehensions of men,