Christianity, in order to match morality of this strain, has to correct its apparent offers of external reward, and to say:  The kingdom of God is within you.

I have said that it is by its accent of emotion that the morality of Marcus Aurelius acquires a special character, and reminds one of Christian morality.  The sentences of Seneca[225] are stimulating to the intellect; the sentences of Epictetus are fortifying to the character; the sentences of Marcus Aurelius find their way to the soul.  I have said that religious emotion has the power to light up morality:  the emotion of Marcus Aurelius does not quite light up his morality, but it suffuses it; it has not power to melt the clouds of effort and austerity quite away, but it shines through them and glorifies them; it is a spirit, not so much of gladness and elation, as of gentleness and sweetness; a delicate and tender sentiment, which is less than joy and more than resignation.  He says that in his youth he learned from Maximus, one of his teachers, “cheerfulness in all circumstances as well as in illness; and a just admixture in the moral character of sweetness and dignity”:  and it is this very admixture of sweetness with his dignity which makes him so beautiful a moralist.  It enables him to carry even into his observation of nature, a delicate penetration, a sympathetic tenderness, worthy of Wordsworth; the spirit of such a remark as the following has hardly a parallel, so far as my knowledge goes, in the whole range of Greek and Roman literature:—­

“Figs, when they are quite ripe, gape open; and in the ripe olives the very circumstance of their being near to rottenness adds a peculiar beauty to the fruit.  And the ears of corn bending down, and the lion’s eyebrows, and the foam which flows from the mouth of wild boars, and many other things,—­though they are far from being beautiful, in a certain sense,—­still, because they come in the course of nature, have a beauty in them, and they please the mind; so that if a man should have a feeling and a deeper insight with respect to the things which are produced in the universe, there is hardly anything which comes in the course of nature which will not seem to him to be in a manner disposed so as to give pleasure."[226]

But it is when his strain passes to directly moral subjects that his delicacy and sweetness lend to it the greatest charm.  Let those who can feel the beauty of spiritual refinement read this, the reflection of an emperor who prized mental superiority highly:—­

“Thou sayest, ‘Men cannot admire the sharpness of thy wits.’  Be it so; but there are many other things of which thou canst not say, ’I am not formed for them by nature.’  Show those qualities, then, which are altogether in thy power,—­sincerity, gravity, endurance of labor, aversion to pleasure, contentment with thy portion and with few things, benevolence, frankness, no love of superfluity, freedom from trifling, magnanimity.