Mammon and his message - 1908 Author:John Davidson Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: EPILOGUE It has been asked how it was that Epicureanism and Stoicism went down before Christianity. In their day these systems had a great exhibition and acce... more »ptation ; and both antedated the Christian ethic. Epicureanism had undeserved honour at the hands of Lucretius, was also transmuted into the exquisite worldliness of Horace, and endured in the sixteenth century an unnecessary resuscitation by Gassendi as the true complement of Christianity ; while Stoicism, descending through Zeno from Socrates, exemplified in the life and embodied in the sayings of the slave Epictetus, found a shabby apotheosis in the deeds and meditations of the crowned mediocrity, Marcus Aurelius. How was it then? The answer is simple :—Neither of these systems ministered to our Vanity and our Malice. Both Epicureanism and Stoicism retained the dual world of gods and men. But the Epicurean gods, imperishable and beatified, dwelt in void space, indifferent to us and our concerns. As for Stoicism, it held that the gods concerned themselves in human affairs, so far at least as to permit fortune and misfortune to happen promiscuously to the virtuous and the vicious: a seeming injustice which the Stoic easily explained away by assuring himself that neither the virtuous nor the vicious had anything intrinsically noble or base in their nature. There was a strain of the cowardice of Agnosticism in both these systems; the immanent gods of the porch as well as the careless gods of the garden were only half-gods, half-believed in. Moreover, all the counsels and philosoph ernes of the rival systems were directed to very pitiful ends: —how to make life tolerable; how to make it possible ; how not to be troubled ; how not to be afraid. It was not greatness that went down before Christianity, not a lofty genius like H...« less