Many a time, when life went hard with me, I have betaken myself to the Stoics, and not all in vain.  Marcus Aurelius has often been one of my bedside books; I have read him in the night watches, when I could not sleep for misery, and when assuredly I could have read nothing else.  He did not remove my burden; his proofs of the vanity of earthly troubles availed me nothing; but there was a soothing harmony in his thought which partly lulled my mind, and the mere wish that I could find strength to emulate that high example (though I knew that I never should) was in itself a safeguard against the baser impulses of wretchedness.  I read him still, but with no turbid emotion, thinking rather of the man than of the philosophy, and holding his image dear in my heart of hearts.

Of course the intellectual assumption which makes his system untenable by the thinker of our time is:  that we possess a knowledge of the absolute.  Noble is the belief that by exercise of his reason a man may enter into communion with that Rational Essence which is the soul of the world; but precisely because of our inability to find within ourselves any such sure and certain guidance do we of to-day accept the barren doom of scepticism.  Otherwise, the Stoic’s sense of man’s subordination in the universal scheme, and of the all-ruling destiny, brings him into touch with our own philosophical views, and his doctrine concerning the “sociable” nature of man, of the reciprocal obligations which exist between all who live, are entirely congenial to the better spirit of our day.  His fatalism is not mere resignation; one has not only to accept one’s lot, whatever it is, as inevitable, but to accept it with joy, with praises.  Why are we here?  For the same reason that has brought about the existence of a horse, or of a vine, to play the part allotted to us by Nature.  As it is within our power to understand the order of things, so are we capable of guiding ourselves in accordance therewith; the will, powerless over circumstance, is free to determine the habits of the soul.  The first duty is self-discipline; its correspondent first privilege is an inborn knowledge of the law of life.

But we are fronted by that persistent questioner who will accept no a priori assumption, however noble in its character and beneficent in its tendency.  How do we know that the reason of the Stoic is at harmony with the world’s law?  I, perhaps, may see life from a very different point of view; to me reason may dictate, not self-subdual, but self-indulgence; I may find in the free exercise of all my passions an existence far more consonant with what seems to me the dictate of Nature.  I am proud; Nature has made me so; let my pride assert itself to justification.  I am strong; let me put forth my strength, it is the destiny of the feeble to fall before me.  On the other hand, I am weak and I suffer; what avails a mere assertion that fate is just, to bring about