112 EVOLUTION AND ETHICS. ii 



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

 of nature: the exact form of that order is an alto- 

 gether secondary consideration. 



Many ingenious persons now appear to consider 

 that the incompatibility of pantheism, of material- 

 ism, 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 philoso- 

 phies, Stoicism exhibits the highest ethical develop- 

 ment, 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 Chris- 

 tian Church; and the genuineness of a correspond- 

 ence 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 



