he is master of himself, and the equal of God; he looks down upon everything with sublime imperturbability, despising the sadnesses of humanity and smiling with irritating loftiness at all our hopes and all our fears.  But, in another sketch of this faultless and unpleasant monster, Seneca presents us, not the proud athlete who challenges the universe and is invulnerable to all the stings and arrows of passion or of fate, but a hero in the serenity of absolute triumph, more tender, indeed, but still without desires, without passions, without needs, who can fell no pity, because pity is a weakness which disturbs his sapient calm!  Well might the eloquent Bossuet exclaim, as he read of these chimerical perfections, “It is to take a tone too lofty for feeble and mortal men.  But, O maxims truly pompous!  O affected insensibility!  O false and imaginary wisdom! which fancies itself strong because it is hard, and generous because it is puffed up!  How are these principles opposed to the modest simplicity of the Saviour of souls, who, in our Gospel contemplating His faithful ones in affliction, confesses that they will be saddened by it! Ye shall weep and lament.”  Shall Christians be jealous of such wisdom as Stoicism did really attain, when they compare this dry and bloodless ideal with Him who wept over Jerusalem and mourned by the grave of Lazarus, who had a mother and a friend, who disdained none, who pitied all, who humbled Himself to death, even the death of the cross, whose divine excellence we cannot indeed attain because He is God, but whose example we can imitate because He was very man?[77]

[Footnote 77:  See Martha, Les Moralistes, p. 50; Aubertin, Seneque et St. Paul p. 250.]

The one grand aim of the life and philosophy of Seneca was Ease.  It is the topic which constantly recurs in his books On a Happy Life, On Tranquility of Mind, On Anger, and On the Ease and On the Firmness of the Sage.  It is the pitiless apathy, the stern repression, of every form of emotion, which was constantly glorified as the aim of philosophy.  It made Stilpo exclaim, when he had lost wife, property, and children, that he had lost nothing, because he carried in his own person everything which he possessed.  It led Seneca into all that is most unnatural, all that is most fantastic, and all that is least sincere in his writings; it was the bitter source of disgrace and failure in his life.  It comes out worst of all in his book On Anger.  Aristotle had said that “Anger was a good servant but a bad master;” Plato had recognized the immense value and importance of the irascible element in the moral constitution.  Even Christian writers, in spite of Bishop Butler, have often lost sight of this truth, and have forgotten that to a noble nature “the hate of hate” and the “scorn of scorn” are as indispensable as “the love of love.”  But Seneca almost gets angry himself at the very notion of the wise man being angry and indignant even against