THE RELATIONS OF LATIN 185 



account for their resemblance. Some passages in Seneca are indeed 

 startling enough to awaken a suspicion of some contact. He several 

 times speaks of God as parens noster, and as " within us " (prope est 

 a te deus, tecum est, intus est) ; he calls him sacer spiritus (Sacer intra 

 nos spiritus sedet the same idea as I Corinthians in, 16, and vi, 19, 

 "your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost in you"). Whether 

 Seneca may not have come into contact with some refined form of 

 Judaism at Rome, it is indeed hard to say. Yet these terms are 

 Stoical property: the "God within" of Seneca is the same as the 

 dominans ille in nobis deus of Cicero, and the divinae particula aurae 

 of Horace. And if Seneca has some striking parallels to the ethical 

 teaching of the Sermon on the Mount, these are only deductions 

 from that fundamental ethical principle of Stoicism by which it is 

 linked not less with Aristotle than with Christianity: hominem 

 saddle animal, communi bono genitum. 1 "Nur allein der Mensch 

 vermag das Unmogliche." The Stoics had seized the grand concep- 

 tion that Reason, man's prerogative, is an emanation from, or part 

 of, the Deity. I know of no better general exposition of this doctrine 

 of the " Indwelling Supreme Spirit " than Emerson's Divinity School 

 Address of 1838. 



Let us now turn to the second period in the history of the Latin 

 language, the period in which Latin becomes the organ of the Christ- 

 ian Church. In this period, which extends from the latter second 

 part of the second century to the latter part of the fifth Period 

 century A.D., from Marcus Aurelius to the fall of the Western Empire, 

 Christianity was taking shape : and it brings us to the second great 

 element out of which the composite unity of Latin civilization was 

 developed. The official conversion of the Roman Empire to Christ- 

 ianity in the fourth century has been called " the miracle of history "; 2 

 but there is no need to appeal to miracles in this case. The Grseco- 

 Roman world was prepared for the reception of Christianity through 

 that shifting of the ancient landmarks which finds expression in 

 Stoicism. And there is also another order of facts to which I have 

 now to allude, avoiding as far as possible controversial matter. For 

 if Stoicism was a composite thing, Christianity, as it entered the 

 stream of Roman history, was not a simple one. 



lam pridem Syrus in Tiberim defluxit Orontes, 



says Juvenal (3, 62) in his indiscriminate manner. But before the 

 Orontes flowed into the Tiber it had admitted a Greek tributary. Of 

 the social and intellectual life of Syria proper during the centuries 

 that followed Alexander's conquest, we know, alas, too little. What 

 would we not give to be present in one of those old lecture-rooms of 



1 Seneca, De Clem, i, 3, 2. 



2 Freeman. 



