power that was to renew the life of the world was already present in Christianity.  He himself was in soul almost a Christian, though he did not know it, and though the Christian element of faith and hope was wanting.  But he expressed a thought worthy of the Gospel, when he said:  “The man of disciplined mind reverently bids Nature, who bestows all things and resumes them again to herself, ’Give what thou wilt, and take what thou wilt.’"[305]

Although we have seen that Seneca speaks of a sacred, spirit which dwells in us, other passages in his works (quoted by Zeller) show that he was, like other Stoics, a pantheist, and meant the soul of the world.  He says (Nat.  Qu., II. 45, and Prolog. 13):  “Will you call God the world?  You may do so without mistake.  For he is all that you see around you.”  “What is God?  The mind of the universe.  What is God?  All that you see, and all that you do not see."[306]

It was not philosophy which destroyed religion in Rome.  Philosophy, no doubt, weakened faith in the national gods, and made the national worship seem absurd.  But it was the general tendency downward; it was the loss of the old Roman simplicity and purity; it was the curse of Caesarism, which, destroying all other human life, destroyed also the life of religion.  What it came to at last, in well-endowed minds, may be seen in this extract from the elder Pliny:—­

“All religion is the offspring of necessity, weakness, and fear. What God is, if in truth he be anything distinct from the world, it is beyond the compass of man’s understanding to know.  But it is a foolish delusion, which has sprung from human weakness and human pride, to imagine that such an infinite spirit would concern himself with the petty affairs of men.  It is difficult to say, whether it might not be better for men to be wholly without religion, than to have one of this kind, which is a reproach to its object.  The vanity of man, and his insatiable longing after existence, have led him also to dream of a life after death.  A being full of contradictions, he is the most wretched of creatures; since the other creatures have no wants transcending the bounds of their nature.  Man is full of desires and wants that reach to infinity, and can never be satisfied.  His nature is a lie, uniting the greatest poverty with the greatest pride.  Among these so great evils, the best thing God has bestowed on man is the power to take his own life."[307]

The system of the Stoics was exactly adapted to the Roman character; but, naturally, it exaggerated its faults instead of correcting them.  It supplanted all other systems in the esteem of leading minds; but the narrowness of the Roman intellect reacted on the philosophy, and made that much more narrow than it was in the Greek thought.  It became simple ethics, omitting both the physical and metaphysical side.