but is always becoming” ([Greek:  aei gignetai]), he delivered a text, out of which we may derive something; for he destroys by it not all practical, but all speculative notions of cause and effect.  The whole series of things, as they appear to us, must be contemplated in time, that is in succession, and we conceive or suppose intervals between one state of things and another state of things, so that there is priority and sequence, and interval, and Being, and a ceasing to Be, and beginning and ending.  But there is nothing of the kind in the Nature of Things.  It is an everlasting continuity (iv. 45; vii. 75).  When Antoninus speaks of generation (x. 26), he speaks of one cause ([Greek:  aitia]) acting, and then another cause taking up the work, which the former left in a certain state, and so on; and we might perhaps conceive that he had some notion like what has been called “the self-evolving power of nature;” a fine phrase indeed, the full import of which I believe that the writer of it did not see, and thus he laid himself open to the imputation of being a follower of one of the Hindu sects, which makes all things come by evolution out of nature or matter, or out of something which takes the place of Deity, but is not Deity.  I would have all men think as they please, or as they can, and I only claim the same freedom which I give.  When a man writes anything, we may fairly try to find out all that his words must mean, even if the result is that they mean what he did not mean; and if we find this contradiction, it is not our fault, but his misfortune.  Now Antoninus is perhaps somewhat in this condition in what he says (x. 26), though he speaks at the end of the paragraph of the power which acts, unseen by the eyes, but still no less clearly.  But whether in this passage (x. 26) lie means that the power is conceived to be in the different successive causes ([Greek:  aitiai]), or in something else, nobody can tell.  From other passages, however, I do collect that his notion of the phenomena of the universe is what I have stated.  The Deity works unseen, if we may use such language, and perhaps I may, as Job did, or he who wrote the book of Job.  “In him we live and move and are,” said St. Paul to the Athenians; and to show his hearers that this was no new doctrine, he quoted the Greek poets.  One of these poets was the Stoic Cleauthes, whose noble hymn to Zeus, or God, is an elevated expression of devotion and philosophy.  It deprives Nature of her power, and puts her under the immediate government of the Deity.

“Thee all this heaven, which whirls around the earth,
 Obeys, and willing follows where thou leadest. 
 Without thee, God, nothing is done on earth,
 Nor in the ethereal realms, nor in the sea,
 Save what the wicked through their folly do.”

Antoninus’ conviction of the existence of a divine power and government was founded on his perception of the order of the universe.  Like Socrates (Xen.  Mem., iv. 3, 13, etc.) he says that though we cannot see the forms of divine powers, we know that they exist because we see their works.