to seek, who hast led me to find Thee, and hast given the hope of finding Thee more and more.  My strength and my weakness are in Thy sight; preserve my strength and heal my weakness.  My knowledge and my ignorance are in Thy sight; when Thou hast opened to me, receive me as I enter; when Thou hast closed, open to me as I knock.  May I remember Thee, understand Thee, love Thee.  Increase these things in me, until Thou renew me wholly.  But oh, that I might speak only in preaching Thy word and in praising Thee.  But many are my thoughts, such as Thou knowest, “thoughts of man, that are vain.”  Let them not so prevail in me, that anything in my acts should proceed from them; but at least that my judgment and my conscience be safe from them under Thy protection.  When the wise man spake of Thee in his book, which is now called by the special name of Ecclesiasticus, “We speak,” he says, “much, and yet come short; and in sum of words, He is all.”  When therefore we shall have come to Thee, these very many things that we speak, and yet come short, shall cease; and Thou, as One, shalt remain “all in all.”  And we shall say one thing without end, in praising Thee as One, ourselves also made one in Thee.  O Lord, the one God, God the Trinity, whatever I have said in these books that is of Thine, may they acknowledge who are Thine; if I have said anything of my own, may it be pardoned both by Thee and by those who are Thine.  Amen.

The three immediately preceding citations, from ’A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, First Series,’ are reprinted by permission of the Christian Literature Company, New York.

MARCUS AURELIUS ANTONINUS

(121-180 A.D.)

BY JAMES FRASER GLUCK

Marcus Aurelius, one of the most illustrious emperors of Rome, and, according to Canon Farrar, “the noblest of pagan emperors”, was born at Rome April 20th, A.D. 121, and died at Vindobona—­the modern Vienna—­March 17th, A.D. 180, in the twentieth year of his reign and the fifty-ninth year of his age.

His right to an honored place in literature depends upon a small volume written in Greek, and usually called ’The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius.’  The work consists of mere memoranda, notes, disconnected reflections and confessions, and also of excerpts from the Emperor’s favorite authors.  It was evidently a mere private diary or note-book written in great haste, which readily accounts for its repetitions, its occasional obscurity, and its frequently elliptical style of expression.  In its pages the Emperor gives his aspirations, and his sorrow for his inability to realize them in his daily life; he expresses his tentative opinions concerning the problems of creation, life, and death; his reflections upon the deceitfulness of riches, pomp, and power, and his conviction of the vanity of all things except the performance of