in:--

"What more dost thou want when thou hast done a man a service? Art thou
not content that thou hast done something conformable to thy nature, and
dost thou seek to be paid for it, _just as if the eye demanded a
recompense for seeing, or the feet for walking_?"

Christianity, in order to match morality of this strain, has to correct
its apparent offers of external reward, and to say: "The kingdom of God is
within you."

I have said that it is by its accent of emotion that the morality of
Marcus Aurelius acquires a special character, and reminds one of Christian
morality. The sentences of Seneca are stimulating to the intellect; the
sentences of Epictetus are fortifying to the character; the sentences of
Marcus Aurelius find their way to the soul. I have said that religious
emotion has the power to _light up_ morality: the emotion of Marcus
Aurelius does not quite light up his morality, but it suffuses it; it has
not power to melt the clouds of effort and austerity quite away, but it
shines through them and glorifies them; it is a spirit, not so much of
gladness and elation, as of gentleness and sweetness; a delicate and
tender sentiment, which is less than joy and more than resignation. He
says that in his youth he learned from Maximus, one of his teachers,
"cheerfulness in all circumstances as well as in illness; _and a just
admixture in the moral character of sweetness and dignity_": and it is
this very admixture of sweetness with his dignity which makes him so
beautiful a moralist. It enables him to carry, even into his observation
of nature, a delicate penetration, a sympathetic tenderness, worthy of
Wordsworth; the spirit of such a remark as the following seems to me to
have no parallel in the whole range of Greek and Roman literature:--

"Figs, when they are quite ripe, gape open; and in the ripe olives the
very circumstance of their being near to rottenness adds a peculiar beauty
to the fruit. And the ears of corn bending down, and the lion's eyebrows,
and the foam which flows from the mouth of wild boars, and many other
things,--though they are far from being beautiful, in a certain
sense,--still, because they come in the course of nature, have a beauty in
them, and they please the mind; so that, if a man should have a feeling
and a deeper insight with respect to the things which are produced in the
universe, there is hardly anything which comes in the course of nature
which will not seem to him to be in