If it was given to the Jew to speak with diviner insight and intenser power, it is given to the Gentile also to speak at times with a large and lofty utterance, and we may learn truth from men of alien lips and another tongue.  They, too, had the dream, the vision, the dark saying upon the harp, the “daughter of a voice,” the mystic flashes upon the graven gems.  And such truths come to us with a singular force and freshness; with a strange beauty as the doctrines of a less brightly illuminated manhood; with a new power of conviction from their originality of form, which, because it is less familiar to us, is well calculated to arrest our attention after it has been paralysed by familiar repetitions.  We cannot afford to lose these heathen testimonies to Christian truth; or to hush the glorious utterances of Muse and Sibyl which have justly outlived “the drums and tramplings of a hundred triumphs.”  We may make them infinitely profitable to us.  If St. Paul quotes Aratus, and Menander, and Epimenides,[76] and perhaps more than one lyrical melody besides, with earnest appreciation,—­if the inspired Apostle could both learn himself and teach others out of the utterances of a Cretan philosopher and an Attic comedian, we may be sure that many of Seneca’s apophthegams would have filled him with pleasure, and that he would have been able to read Epictetus and Aurelius with the same noble admiration which made him see with thankful emotion that memorable altar TO THE UNKNOWN GOD.

[Footnote 73:  Now known to be unhistorical.]

[Footnote 74:  Heb. i. 1.]

[Footnote 75:  [Greek:  polypoikilos dophia].]

[Footnote 76:  See Acts xvii. 28; 1 Cor.; Tit. i. 12.]

Let us then make a brief and final sketch of the three great Stoics whose lives we have been contemplating, with a view to summing up their specialties, their deficiencies, and the peculiar relations to, or divergences from, Christian truth, which their writings present to us.

“Seneca saepe noster,” “Seneca, often our own,” is the expression of Tertullian, and he uses it as an excuse for frequent references to his works.  Yet if, of the three, he be most like Christianity in particular passages, he diverges most widely from it in his general spirit.

He diverges from Christianity in many of his modes of regarding life, and in many of his most important beliefs.  What, for instance, is his main conception of the Deity?  Seneca is generally a Pantheist.  No doubt he speaks of God’s love and goodness, but with him God is no personal living Father, but the soul of the universe—­the fiery, primaeval, eternal principle which transfuses an inert, and no less eternal, matter, and of which our souls are, as it were, but divine particles or passing sparks.  “God,” he says, “is Nature, is Fate, is Fortune, is the Universe, is the all-pervading Mind.  He cannot change the substance of the universe, He is himself under the power of Destiny, which is uncontrollable and immutable.  It is not God who rolls the thunder, it is Fate.  He does not rejoice in His works, but is identical with them.”  In fact, Seneca would have heartily adopted the words of Pope: