There are many other passages in which Epictetus shows that the free-will of man is his noblest privilege, and that we should not “sell it for a trifle;” or, as Scripture still more sternly expresses it, should not “sell ourselves for nought.”  He relates, for instance, the complete failure of the Emperor Vespasian to induce Helvidius Priscus not to go to the Senate.  “While I am a Senator,” said Helvidius, “I must go.”  “Well, then, at least be silent there.”  “Ask me no questions, and I will be silent.”  “But I must ask your opinion.”  “And I must say what is right.”  “But I will put you to death.”  “Did I ever tell you I was immortal?  Do your part, and I will do mine.  It is yours to kill me, mine to die untrembling; yours to banish me, mine to go into banishment without grief.”

We see from these remarkable extracts that the wisest of the heathen had, by God’s grace, attained to the sense that life was subject to a divine guidance.  Yet how dim was their vision of this truth, how insecure their hold upon it, in comparison with that which the meanest Christian may attain!  They never definitely grasped the doctrine of immortality.  They never quite got rid of a haunting dread that perhaps, after all, they might be nothing better than insignificant and unheeded atoms, swept hither and thither in the mighty eddies of an unseen, impersonal, mysterious agency, and destined hereafter “to be sealed amid the iron hills,” or

     “To be imprisoned in the viewless winds. 
      And blown with reckless violence about
      The pendent world.”

Their belief in a personal deity was confused with their belief in nature, which, in the language of a modern sceptic, “acts with fearful uniformity:  stern as fate, absolute as tyranny, merciless as death; too vast to praise, too inexorable to propitiate, it has no ear for prayer, no heart for sympathy, no arm to save.”  How different the soothing and tender certainty of the Christian’s hope, for whom Christ has brought life and immortality to light!  For “chance” is not only “the daughter of forethought,” as the old Greek lyric poet calls her, but the daughter also of love.  How different the prayer of David, even in the hours of his worst agony and shame, “Let Thy loving Spirit lead me forth into the land of righteousness.”  Guidance, and guidance by the hand of love, was—­as even in that dark season he recognised—­the very law of his life; and his soul, purged by affliction, had but a single wish—­the wish to be led, not into prosperity, not into a recovery of his lost glory, not even into the restoration of his lost innocence; but only,—­through paths however hard—­only into the land of righteousness.  And because he knew that God would lead him thitherward, he had no wish, no care for anything beyond.  We will end this chapter by translating a few of the isolated fragments of Epictetus which have been preserved for us by other writers.  The wisdom and beauty of these fragments will interest the reader, for Epictetus was one of the few “in the very dust of whose thoughts was gold.”