ors professed Stoicism. It held before
them the ideal of universal Brotherhood, and of duty to the 'Great
Society of Gods and Men'; it enabled them to work, indifferent to mere
pain and pleasure, as servants of the divine purpose and 'fellow-workers
with God' in building up a human Cosmos within the eternal Cosmos. It
is perhaps at first sight strange that many kings and governors also
followed Epicurus. Yet after all the work of a public man is not
hindered by a slight irony as to the value of worldly greatness and a
conviction that a dinner of bread and water with love to season it 'is
better than all the crowns of the Greeks'. To hate cruelty and
superstition, to avoid passion and luxury, to regard human 'pleasure' or
'sweetness of life' as the goal to be aimed at, and 'friendship' or
'kindliness' as the principal element in that pleasure, are by no means
doctrines incompatible with wise and effective administration. Both
systems were good and both in a way complementary one to another. They
still divide between them the practical philosophy of western mankind.
At times to most of us it seems as though nothing in life had value
except to do right and to fear not; at others that the only true aim is
to make mankind happy. At times man's best hope seems to lie in that
part of him which is prepared to defy or condemn the world of fact if it
diverges from the ideal; in that intensity of reverence which will
accept many impossibilities rather than ever reject a holy thing; above
all in that uncompromising moral sensitiveness to which not merely the
corruptions of society but the fundamental and necessary facts of animal
existence seem both nauseous and wicked, links and chains in a system
which can never be the true home of the human spirit. At other times men
feel the need to adapt their beliefs and actions to the world as it is;
to brush themselves free from cobwebs; to face plain facts with common
sense and as much kindliness as life permits, meeting the ordinary needs
of a perishable and imperfect species without illusion and without
make-believe. At one time we are Stoics, at another Epicureans.

But amid their differences there is one faith which was held by both
schools in common. It is the great characteristic faith of the ancient
world, revealing itself in many divergent guises and seldom fully
intelligible to modern men; faith in the absolute supremacy of the
inward life over things external. These men really bel