112 EVOLUTION AND ETHICS n 



of the law of causation, with its corollary, the order 

 of nature : the exact form of that order is an altogether 

 secondary consideration. 



Many ingenious persons now appear to consider that 

 the incompatibility 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 difficulty 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 

 (Epistle to the Philippians) is particularly worthy of 

 study, apart from this question, on account of the 



