“All are but parts of one stupendous whole,
      Whose body nature is, and God the soul.”

Though there may be a vague sense in which those words may be admitted and explained by Christians, yet, in the mind of Seneca, they led to conclusions directly opposed to those of Christianity.  With him, for instance, the wise man is the equal of God; not His adorer, not His servant, not His suppliant, but His associate, His relation.  He differs from God in time alone.  Hence all prayer is needless he says, and the forms of external worship are superfluous and puerile.  It is foolish to beg for that which you can impart to yourself.  “What need is there of vows?  Make yourself happy.”  Nay, in the intolerable arrogance which marked the worst aberration of Stoicism, the wise man is under certain aspects placed even higher than God—­higher than God Himself—­because God is beyond the reach of misfortunes, but the wise man is superior to their anguish; and because God is good of necessity, but the wise man from choice.  This wretched and inflated paradox occurs in Seneca’s treatise On Providence, and in the same treatise he glorifies suicide, and expresses a doubt as to the immortality of the soul.

Again, the two principles on which Seneca relied as the basis of all his moral system are:  first, the principle that we ought to follow Nature; and, secondly, the supposed perfectibility of the ideal man.

1.  Now, of course, if we explain this precept of “following Nature” as Juvenal has explained it, and say that the voice of Nature is always coincident with the voice of philosophy—­if we prove that our real nature is none other than the dictate of our highest and most nobly trained reason, and if we can establish the fact that every deed of cruelty, of shame, of lust, or of selfishness, is essentially contrary to our nature—­then we may say with Bishop Butler, that the precept to “follow Nature” is “a manner of speaking not loose and undeterminate, but clear and distinct, strictly just and true.”  But how complete must be the system, how long the preliminary training, which alone can enable us to find any practical value, any appreciable aid to a virtuous life, in a dogma such as this!  And, in the hands of Seneca, it becomes a very empty formula.  He entirely lacked the keen insight and dialectic subtlety of such a writer as Bishop Butler; and, in his explanation of this Stoical shibboleth, any real meaning which it may possess is evaporated into a gorgeous mist of confused declamation and splendid commonplace.

2.  Nor is he much more fortunate with his ideal man.  This pompous abstraction presents us with a conception at once ambitious and sterile.  The Stoic wise man is a sort of moral Phoenix, impossible and repulsive.  He is intrepid in dangers, free from all passion, happy in adversity, calm in the storm; he alone knows how to live, because he alone knows how to die; he is the master of the world, because