es of Muse and Sibyl which have justly
outlived "the drums and tramplings of a hundred triumphs." We may make
them infinitely profitable to us. If St. Paul quotes Aratus, and
Menander, and Epimenides,[76] and perhaps more than one lyrical melody
besides, with earnest appreciation,--if the inspired Apostle could both
learn himself and teach others out of the utterances of a Cretan
philosopher and an Attic comedian, we may be sure that many of Seneca's
apophthegams would have filled him with pleasure, and that he would have
been able to read Epictetus and Aurelius with the same noble admiration
which made him see with thankful emotion that memorable altar TO THE
UNKNOWN GOD.

[Footnote 73: Now known to be unhistorical.]

[Footnote 74: Heb. i. 1.]

[Footnote 75: [Greek: polypoikilos dophia].]

[Footnote 76: See Acts xvii. 28; 1 Cor.; Tit. i. 12.]

Let us then make a brief and final sketch of the three great Stoics
whose lives we have been contemplating, with a view to summing up their
specialties, their deficiencies, and the peculiar relations to, or
divergences from, Christian truth, which their writings present to us.

"Seneca saepe noster," "Seneca, often our own," is the expression of
Tertullian, and he uses it as an excuse for frequent references to his
works. Yet if, of the three, he be most like Christianity in particular
passages, he diverges most widely from it in his general spirit.

He diverges from Christianity in many of his modes of regarding life,
and in many of his most important beliefs. What, for instance, is his
main conception of the Deity? Seneca is generally a Pantheist. No doubt
he speaks of God's love and goodness, but with him God is no personal
living Father, but the soul of the universe--the fiery, primaeval,
eternal principle which transfuses an inert, and no less eternal,
matter, and of which our souls are, as it were, but divine particles or
passing sparks. "God," he says, "is Nature, is Fate, is Fortune, is the
Universe, is the all-pervading Mind. He cannot change the substance of
the universe, He is himself under the power of Destiny, which is
uncontrollable and immutable. It is not God who rolls the thunder, it is
Fate. He does not rejoice in His works, but is identical with them." In
fact, Seneca would have heartily adopted the words of Pope:

"All are but parts of one stupendous whole,
Whose body nature is, and God the soul."

Though there may be a vague sense in whic