Page:Cicero (Collins 1871).djvu/197

Rh Seneca wanting in personal courage. Yet it was surely something to have set up a noble ideal, though they might not attain to it themselves, and in "that hideous carnival of vice" to have kept themselves, so far as they might, unspotted from the world. Certain it is that no other ancient sect ever came so near the light of revelation. Passages from Seneca, from Epictetus, from Marcus Aurelius, sound even now like fragments of the inspired writings. The Unknown God, whom they ignorantly worshipped as the Soul or Reason of the World, is—in spite of Milton's strictures—the beginning and the end of their philosophy. Let us listen for a moment to their language. "Prayer should be only for the good." "Men should act according to the spirit, and not according to the letter of their faith." "Wouldest thou propitiate the gods? Be good: he has worshipped them sufficiently who has imitated them." It was from a Stoic poet, Aratus, that St Paul quoted the great truth which was the rational argument against idolatry—"For we are also His offspring, and" (so the original passage concludes) "we alone possess a voice, which is the image of reason." It is in another poet of the same school that we find what are perhaps the noblest lines in all Latin poetry. Persius concludes his Satire on the common hypocrisy of those prayers and offerings to the gods which were but a service of the lips and hands, in words of which an English rendering may give the sense but not the beauty:—"Nay, then, let us offer to the gods that which the debauched sons of great Messala can never bring on their broad chargers,