e a golden book, though there are things in
it which cannot be read without deep grief, for there we find this purest
of men without happiness." Though absolute monarch of the Empire, and rich
in the universal love of his people, he was not powerful enough to resist
the steady tendency to decay in society. Nor did he know that the power
that was to renew the life of the world was already present in
Christianity. He himself was in soul almost a Christian, though he did not
know it, and though the Christian element of faith and hope was wanting.
But he expressed a thought worthy of the Gospel, when he said: "The man of
disciplined mind reverently bids Nature, who bestows all things and
resumes them again to herself, 'Give what thou wilt, and take what thou
wilt.'"[305]

Although we have seen that Seneca speaks of a sacred, spirit which dwells
in us, other passages in his works (quoted by Zeller) show that he was,
like other Stoics, a pantheist, and meant the soul of the world. He says
(Nat. Qu., II. 45, and Prolog. 13): "Will you call God the world? You may
do so without mistake. For he is all that you see around you." "What is
God? The mind of the universe. What is God? All that you see, and all that
you do not see."[306]

It was not philosophy which destroyed religion in Rome. Philosophy, no
doubt, weakened faith in the national gods, and made the national worship
seem absurd. But it was the general tendency downward; it was the loss of
the old Roman simplicity and purity; it was the curse of Caesarism, which,
destroying all other human life, destroyed also the life of religion. What
it came to at last, in well-endowed minds, may be seen in this extract
from the elder Pliny:--

"All religion is the offspring of necessity, weakness, and fear. _What_
God is, if in truth he be anything distinct from the world, it is
beyond the compass of man's understanding to know. But it is a foolish
delusion, which has sprung from human weakness and human pride, to
imagine that such an infinite spirit would concern himself with the
petty affairs of men. It is difficult to say, whether it might not be
better for men to be wholly without religion, than to have one of this
kind, which is a reproach to its object. The vanity of man, and his
insatiable longing after existence, have led him also to dream of a
life after death. A being full of contradictions, he is the most
wretched of creatures; since the ot