they have the charm
of perfect sincerity. He was born a.d. 121, he became Emperor a.d.
161, and died a.d. 180, after nineteen years of a government which
illustrated Plato's words about the good that would ensue when kings
were philosophers and philosophers were kings. Cardinal Barberini, who
translated the Emperor's _Meditations_ into Italian, in 1675, dedicated
the translation to his own soul, to make it "redder than his purple at
the sight of the virtues of this Gentile."

Marcus Aurelius combines reason with beautiful sentiment. His emotion is
always accompanied by thought. Here, for instance, is a noble passage on
the social commonwealth--"For we are made for co-operation, like feet,
like hands, like eyelids, like the rows of the upper and lower teeth.
To act against one another then is contrary to nature; and it is acting
against one another to be vexed and to turn away." In a still loftier
passage he says--and let us remember he says it to himself, not to an
applauding audience, but quietly, and with absolute truth, and no taint
of theatricality--"My nature is rational and social; and my city and
country, so far as I am Antoninus, is Rome; but so far as I am a man,
it is the world." In his brief, pregnant way, he states the law of human
solidarity--"That which is not good for the swarm, neither is it good
for the bee." And who could fail to appreciate this sentiment, coming
as it did from the ruler of a great empire?--"One thing here is worth
a great deal, to pass thy life in truth and justice, with a benevolent
disposition even to liars and unjust men."

Here again, it is the fashion in some circles, to pretend that Marcus
Aurelius was influenced by the spread of Christian ideas. George Long,
however, speaks the language of truth and sobriety in saying, "It
is quite certain that Antoninus did not derive any of his Ethical
principles from a religion of which he knew nothing." To say as Dr.
Schmidt does that "Christian ideas filled the air" is easy enough,
but where is the proof? No doubt the Christian writers made great
pretensions as to the spread of their religion, but they were
notoriously sanguine and inaccurate, and we know what value to attach to
such pretensions in the second century when we reflect that even in
the fourth century, up to the point of Constantine's conversion,
Christianity had only succeeded in drawing into its fold about a
twentieth of the inhabitants of the empire. Enough has been said i