who practised all manner of secret vices, and whose behaviour was in outrageous contradiction to their creed of the “absence of emotions.”  There were not only many Honeymans, there were many Stigginses.  There were idlers and vagabonds on a level with the mendicant friars and pardon-sellers of the time of Chaucer.  There were pompous hypocrites.  Also side by side with the serious and earnest philosopher, as deeply learned in the books of his sect as a modern divine, there were charlatans and dabblers.  It is unfortunately in this last light that the Apostle Paul appeared to the professional Stoic and Epicurean teachers of Athens.  They were the finished products of the philosophic schools of the most famous universities, while he was supposed by them to be teaching some new kind of philosophy.  Philosophers were apt to be itinerant, and St. Paul was looked upon as but another of these new arrivals.  In his language they detected what seemed to be borrowed notions not consistently bound together, and they therefore called him by a name which it is not easy to translate.  Literally it is “a picker up of seeds”—­that is to say, a sciolist who gathers scraps from profounder people and gives them out with an air.  Perhaps the nearest, although an undignified, word is “quack.”  That Paul possessed a knowledge of Greek philosophy, and particularly of Stoicism, is practically certain.  He came from Tarsus in Cilicia, and Cilicia was the native home of many leading Stoics, including its greatest representative in all antiquity.  He had been taught by Gamaliel, who was versed in “the learning of the Greeks.”  His address at Athens was deliberately meant to bear a relation to the philosophy of the experts who were present, but necessarily it could only introduce a few salient allusions, such as even a dabbler could have picked up, and we can hardly blame the specialists for their erroneous judgment.  As he says himself:  “The Greeks demand philosophy; but we proclaim a Messiah crucified, to the Jews a stumbling-block, and to the Greeks a folly.”

To discuss further the moral ideas of the Roman world would consume more space and time than can be afforded here.  It may, however, be worth while to mention that suicide was commonly—­and especially by the Stoics—­looked upon as a natural and blameless thing, when calm reason appeared to justify the proceeding, and when due consideration was given to social claims.  To seek a euthanasia in such cases was an act of wisdom.  Belief in an underworld or an after life was not rare among the common people, but it certainly did not exist in any force among the cultivated classes.  It was taught neither by philosophy nor by the religion of the state.  Yet the sense that rewards or punishments are unfairly meted out in this world was strong in many a mind, and this is one of the facts which account for the hold taken upon such minds, first by the religion of Isis, and then in a still greater and more abiding measure by Christianity.