enty millions was
greater than the joys of any individual existence. And what were any
pleasures which ended in vanity to the sublime placidity of an
emancipated soul? Stoicism, if it did not soar to God and immortality,
yet aspired to the freedom and triumph of what is most precious in man.
And it equally despised, with haughty scorn, those things which
corrupted and degraded this higher nature,--the glorious dignity of
unfettered intellect. The accidents of earth were nothing in his
eyes,--neither the purple of kings nor the rags of poverty. It was the
soul, in its transcendent dignity, which alone was to be preserved
and purified.

This was the exalted realism which appears in the "Meditations" of
Marcus Aurelius, and which he had learned from the inspirations of a
slave. Yet such was the inborn, almost supernatural, loftiness of
Aurelius, that, had he been the slave and Epictetus the emperor, the
same moral wisdom would have shone in the teachings and life of each;
for they both were God's witnesses of truth in an age of wickedness and
shame. It was He who chose them both, and sent them out as teachers of
righteousness,--the one from the humblest cottage, the other from the
most magnificent palace of the capital of the world. In station they
were immeasurably apart; in aim and similarity of ideas they were
kindred spirits,--one of the phenomena of the moral history of our race;
for the slave, in his physical degradation, had all the freedom and
grandeur of an aspiring soul, and the emperor, on his lofty throne, had
all the humility and simplicity of a peasant in the lowliest state of
poverty and suffering. Surely circumstances had nothing to do with this
marvellous exhibition. It was either the mind and soul triumphant over
and superior to all outward circumstances, or it was God imparting an
extraordinary moral power.

I believe it was the inscrutable design of the Supreme Governor of the
universe to show, perhaps, what lessons of moral wisdom could be taught
by men under the most diverse influences and under the greatest
contrasts of rank and power, and also to what heights the souls of both
slave and king could rise, with His aid, in the most corrupt period of
human history. Noah, Abraham, and Moses did not stand more isolated
amidst universal wickedness than did the Phrygian slave and the imperial
master of the world. And as the piety of Noah could not save the
antediluvian empires, as the faith of Abraham cou