as well as the Christian Paul, have insisted on the necessity of an inspiration, a joyful emotion, to make moral action perfect; an obscure indication of this necessity is the one drop of truth in the ocean of verbiage with which the controversy on justification by faith has flooded the world.  But, for the ordinary man, this sense of labor and sorrow constitutes an absolute disqualification; it paralyzes him; under the weight of it, he cannot make way towards the goal at all.  The paramount virtue of religion is, that it has lighted up morality; that it has supplied the emotion and inspiration needful for carrying the sage along the narrow way perfectly, for carrying the ordinary man along it at all.  Even the religions with most dross in them have had something of this virtue; but the Christian religion manifests it with unexampled splendor.  “Lead me, Zeus and Destiny!” says the prayer of Epictetus, “whithersoever I am appointed to go; I will follow without wavering; even though I turn coward and shrink, I shall have to follow all the same."[187] The fortitude of that is for the strong, for the few; even for them the spiritual atmosphere with which it surrounds them is bleak and gray.  But, “Let thy loving spirit lead me forth into the land of righteousness";[188]—­“The Lord shall be unto thee an everlasting light, and thy God thy glory";[189]—­“Unto you that fear my name shall the sun of righteousness arise with healing in his wings,” [190] says the Old Testament; “Born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God";[191]—­“Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God";[192]—­“Whatsoever is born of God, overcometh the world,"[193] says the New.  The ray of sunshine is there, the glow of a divine warmth;—­the austerity of the sage melts away under it, the paralysis of the weak is healed; he who is vivified by it renews his strength; “all things are possible to him “;[194] “he is a new creature."[195]

Epictetus says:  “Every matter has two handles, one of which will bear taking hold of, the other not.  If thy brother sin against thee, lay not hold of the matter by this, that he sins against thee; for by this handle the matter will not bear taking hold of.  But rather lay hold of it by this, that he is thy brother, thy born mate; and thou wilt take hold of it by what will bear handling."[196] Jesus, being asked whether a man is bound to forgive his brother as often as seven times, answers:  “I say not unto thee, until seven times, but until seventy times seven.” [197] Epictetus here suggests to the reason grounds for forgiveness of injuries which Jesus does not; but it is vain to say that Epictetus is on that account a better moralist than Jesus, if the warmth, the emotion, of Jesus’s answer fires his hearer to the practice of forgiveness of injuries, while the thought in Epictetus’s leaves him cold.  So with Christian morality in general:  its distinction is not that it propounds