previous life have known the gods but disregarded them, are perhaps
now born, as it were, blind, unable to see God; persons who have
committed the blasphemy of worshipping their own kings as gods may
perhaps now be cast out from the knowledge of God.

Philosophy had always rejected the Man-God, especially in the form of
King-worship; but opposition to Christianity no doubt intensifies the
protest.

The last chapter is very short. 'Souls that have lived in virtue, being
otherwise blessed and especially separated from their irrational part
and purged of all body, are joined with the gods and sway the whole
world together with them.' So far triumphant faith: then the
after-thought of the brave man who means to live his best life even if
faith fail him. 'But even if none of these rewards came to them, still
Virtue itself and the Joy and Glory of Virtue, and the Life that is
subject to no grief and no master, would be enough to make blessed those
who have set themselves to live in Virtue and have succeeded.'

* * * * *

There the book ends. It ends upon that well-worn paradox which, from the
second book of the _Republic_ onwards, seems to have brought so much
comfort to the nobler spirits of the ancient world. Strange how we
moderns cannot rise to it! We seem simply to lack the intensity of moral
enthusiasm. When we speak of martyrs being happy on the rack; in the
first place we rarely believe it, and in the second we are usually
supposing that the rack will soon be over and that harps and golden
crowns will presently follow. The ancient moralist believed that the
good man was happy then and there, because the joy, being in his soul,
was not affected by the torture of his body.[192:1]

Not being able fully to feel this conviction, we naturally incline to
think it affected or unreal. But, taking the conditions of the ancient
world into account, we must admit that the men who uttered this belief
at least understood better than most of us what suffering was. Many of
them were slaves, many had been captives of war. They knew what they
were talking about. I think, on a careful study of M. Aurelius,
Epictetus, and some of these Neo-Platonic philosophers, that we shall be
forced to realize that these men could rise to much the same heights of
religious heroism as the Catholic saints of the Middle Age, and that
they often did so--if I may use such a phrase--on a purer and thinner
diet of sensuous