NOTES 55 



Many ingenious persons now appear to consider that the in- 

 compatibility of pantheism, of materialism and of any doubt about 

 the immortality of the soul, with religion and morality, is to be 

 held as an axiomatic truth. I confess that I have a certain diffi- 

 culty in accepting this dogma. For the Stoics were notoriously 

 materialists and pantheists of the most extreme character ; and 

 while no strict Stoic believed in the eternal duration of the 

 individual soul, some even denied its persistence after death. 

 Yet it is equally certain that of all gentile philosophies, Stoicism 

 exhibits the highest ethical development, is animated by the 

 most religious spirit, and has exerted the profoundest influence 

 upon the moral and religious development not merely of the best 

 men among the Romans, but among the moderns down to our 

 own day. 



Seneca was claimed as a Christian and placed among the 

 saints by the fathers of the early Christian Church ; and the 

 genuineness of a correspondence between him and the apostle 

 Paul has been hotly maintained in our own time, by orthodox 

 writers. That the letters, as we possess them, are worthless 

 forgeries is obvious ; and writers as wide apart as Baur and 

 Lightfoot agree that the whole story is devoid of foundation. 



The dissertation of the late Bishop of Durham l is particularly 

 worthy of study, apart from this question, on account of the 

 evidence which it supplies of the numerous similarities of thought 

 between Seneca and the writer of the Pauline epistles. When it 

 is remembered that the writer of the Acts puts a quotation from 

 Aratus, or Clean the s, into the mouth of the apostle ; and that 

 Tarsus was a great seat of philosophical and especially stoical 

 learning (Chrysippus himself was a native of the adjacent town 

 of Soli) there is no difficulty in understanding the origin of these 

 resemblances. See, on this subject, Sir Alexander Grant's disser- 

 tation in his edition of ' The Ethics of Aristotle ' (where there is 

 an interesting reference to the stoical character of Bishop Butler's 

 ethics), the concluding pages of Dr. Weygoldt's instructive little 

 work Die Philosophic der /Stoa, and Aubertin's Seneque et Saint 

 Paul. 



It is surprising that a writer of Dr. Lightfoot's stamp should 

 speak of Stoicism as a philosophy of ' despair.' Surely, rather, it 



1 Lightfoot, Epistle to the Philippians. 



