The knowledge thus derived, i.e. the sum-total of religious impressions resulting from the combination of reason and experience, has been called “natural religion;” the term is in itself a convenient and unobjectionable one, so long as it is remembered that natural religion is itself a revelation.  No antithesis is so unfortunate and pernicious as that of natural with revealed religion.  It is “a contrast rather of words than of ideas; it is an opposition of abstractions to which no facts really correspond.”  God has revealed Himself, not in one but in many ways, not only by inspiring the hearts of a few, but by vouchsafing His guidance to all who seek it.  “The spirit of man is the candle of the Lord,” and it is not religion but apostasy to deny the reality of any of God’s revelations of truth to man, merely because they have not descended through a single channel.  On the contrary, we ought to hail with gratitude, instead of viewing with suspicion, the enunciation by heathen writers of truths which we might at first sight have been disposed to regard as the special heritage of Christianity.  In Pythagoras, and Socrates, and Plato,—­in Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius—­we see the light of heaven struggling its impeded way through clouds of darkness and ignorance; we thankfully recognize that the souls of men in the Pagan world, surrounded as they were by perplexities and dangers, were yet enabled to reflect, as from the dim surface of silver, some image of what was divine and true; we hail, with the great and eloquent Bossuet, “THE CHRISTIANITY OF NATURE.”  “The divine image in man,” says St. Bernard, “may be burned, but it cannot be burnt out.”

And this is the pleasantest side on which to consider the life and the writings of Seneca.  It is true that his style partakes of the defects of his age, that the brilliancy of his rhetoric does not always compensate for the defectiveness of his reasoning; that he resembles, not a mirror which clearly reflects the truth, but “a glass fantastically cut into a thousand spangles;” that side by side with great moral truths we sometimes find his worst errors, contradictions, and paradoxes; that his eloquent utterances about God often degenerate into a vague Pantheism; and that even on the doctrine of immortality his hold is too slight to save him from waverings and contradictions;[51] yet as a moral teacher he is full of real greatness, and was often far in advance of the general opinion of his age.  Few men have written more finely, or with more evident sincerity, about truth and courage, about the essential equality of man,[52] about the duty of kindness and consideration to slaves,[53] about tenderness even in dealing with sinners,[54] about the glory of unselfishness,[55] about the great idea of humanity[56] as something which transcends all the natural and artificial prejudices of country and of caste.  Many of his writings are Pagan sermons and moral essays of the best and highest type.  The style, as Quintilian says, “abounds in delightful faults,” but the strain of sentiment is never otherwise than high and true.