Page:Greece from the Coming of the Hellenes to AD. 14.djvu/392

362 no middle term. An action is good or bad. All other things affecting men are indifferent , such as life and death, honour and dishonour, labour and pleasure, wealth and poverty, health and sickness. The perfectly wise man (and he alone) is perfectly virtuous and perfectly happy without regard to any of these external circumstances. Though the equality of all breaches of duty would seem to make social and political institutions useless, yet Stoics were encouraged to enter into ordinary life and business, for they alone are capable of true brotherhood and the highest social life. The religion of Stoicism contained practically the doctrine of Monotheism. One God, of infinite purity, was the origin of all things, existing independently, and furnishing the vital principle which quickened dead matter. In another point of view it is a doctrine of Pantheism—God is everything and everything is God. Providence is not idle, but watches over and directs the universe according to fixed laws and destiny. The human soul, connected with the world-soul, is infused into the body, has a distinct existence and form, and is separated from the body by death. These doctrines commended the Stoic system, with its lofty rules of conduct and reverential views of Nature, to many of the best minds in antiquity; and that Athens should have been the city in which all these philosophies flourished side by side gave her for many centuries a unique place in the admiration and regard of mankind. The highest flight of Stoic views on God and Nature may be here partially illustrated by an extract from a hymn or prayer composed by