with vicissitudes, both good and ill; faithfulness to duty; submissiveness to the divine ordering of the world; contentment. 66 Require not things to happen," said Epictetus, "as you wish; but wish them to happen as they do happen; and all will go on well." Another of his sayings is this: "Remember that you are an actor in a drama, of such a kind as the author pleases to make it. If short, of a short one; if long, of a long one. If it be his pleasure that you should act a poor man, a cripple, a governor, or a private person, see that you act it naturally. For this is your business, to act well the character assigned you to choose it is another's." To the same purpose said Marcus Aurelius: "Live with the gods. And he does live with the gods who constantly shows them that his own soul is satisfied with that which is assigned to him." Again: "Think not so much of what thou hast not as of what thou hast; but of the things which thou hast, select the best, and then reflect how eagerly they would have been sought if thou hadst them not." Among the many fine injunctions of the great emperor there is none finer than this: "Men exist for one another. Teach them then, or bear with them." And this: "Let it make no difference to thee whether thou art cold or warm, if thou art doing thy duty; and whether thou art drowsy or satisfied with sleep; and whether ill-spoken of or praised; and whether dying or doing something else. For it is one of the acts of life, this act by which we die; it is sufficient, then, in this act also, to do well what we have in hand.”

These are pagan morals. Has Christianity improved on them? The question is now timely, for we have arrived, in our hasty survey, within the Christian era. The life of Epictetus was in its first century; that of Marcus Aurelius in the second. It is improbable that either of them knew aught of the teachings of Christ.

In the Sermon on the Mount we have the greater part of the moral prescriptions of Jesus gathered up. With some additions to be made to it from the parables and other portions of the gospels, it may be called the Moral Code of Christianity. In most of its precepts, the Sermon on the Mount differs little from older codes. It repeats the Golden Rule, already formulated in the East. It urges righteousness and purity of heart in general terms. It enjoins humility, meekness, mercifulness, forgiveness, kindly feeling towards one's enemies, sincerity in speech, self-examination, good example. It condemns anger, contention, retaliation, hypocrisy, ostentation in almsgiving and prayer, mammon-worship, anxiety for the future, censoriousness, the taking of oaths. Thus far it contains nothing that is not common to the moralists of earlier times and other regions. In a single point, only, I should say, it reveals a depth of moral perception not discovered before. That is where lustfulness is tracked from the lustful deed to the lustful thought, and the breaking of marriage except for one cause is forbidden. But that alone cannot lift it to any great supremacy above other moral codes.

Nevertheless, there is a difference, very great, between the higher moral notions of antiquity and the higher moral notions of the modern Christian world. What is it? From what does it arise? I think the answer is this: The difference is one, not of quality, but of breadth — of amplitude of practical range; and Jesus gave the key to a moral dispensation as distinctly new as the religious dispensation that he introduced was new, when he answered the lawyer's question, "Who is my neighbor?" by the parable of the Good Samaritan; and when, to the amazement of his disciples, he talked with the woman of Samaria, and abode two days in that alien city, teaching

its people. This would seem to have been the startingpoint of an effective wakening of mankind to the larger sense of human fellowship, of fellowship between men as men, extending beyond tribal lines and race lines, embracing all. The higher civilizations of antiquity had developed a full understanding, as it seems to me, of all the essential principles of moral law, but shrunk them to a narrow application. All that makes Right in the conduct of one man towards another was perfectly recognized, as between two who stood related in some familiar way, as members of the same family group, the same tribe, the same city, the same state. Dimly the recognition might stretch sometimes, and in some particulars, over the large kinship of race; but it has rarely gone to that limit in any primitive society of either ancient or modern times. Within such bounds of obligation, Ptah-hotep, the Egyptian of five thousand years ago, the composers of the Hebrew proverbs, the authors of the Hindu epics and of the Laws of Manu, had little to learn of moral duty or restraint from our Christian twentieth century. The laws of rectitude between their "neighbors" and themselves they knew well; but their "neighbors" dwelt closely around them, worshipped the same gods, obeyed the same king, spoke the same language, followed the same habits of life. For the "stranger,' For the "stranger," outside the gates of their community, they held a very different moral code.

From the time of Christ to our day, two influences have been steadily, slowly working together, to expand that narrowness and littleness of moral view which seems so inveterate in the human mind. One of those influences and I dare not say that it is the more potent one — has been the teaching that compelled the disciples of Christ, first to see a "neighbor" in even the detested Samaritan,

and finally to become "brethren" to the whole Gentile world. The other influence has been the widening and quickening of intercourse, in modern times, between men of different countries, races, classes, and creeds. Increasing acquaintance has been erasing, one by one, the artificial bounds that cribbed their sympathies and their discernment of right. Thus justice, benevolence, charity, tolerance, honesty, magnanimity, have come to mean vastly more than they did in former times, not by anything newly found in the essence of them, but simply by the expanding of their application. It is that which has uprooted slavery,-even, at last, the enslavement of blackskinned by white-skinned races. It is that which slowly makes the instructed feel responsible for the ignorant, the fortunate for the unfortunate, the strong for the weak. It is that which is taking vindictiveness out of law, and ferocity out of war, and which will, in time, not soon, but after some centuries, perhaps,―put tribunals in place of armies and substitute arbitration for war.

Neither of those influences, neither Christian teaching of human fellowship nor widened intercourse in the world, came speedily into effective operation. The voice of Christ was almost silenced for centuries by the din of theological disputes. His precepts were forgotten in the angry war of dogmas. Then, with the fall of the Roman Empire, there came a cloud of darkness over the world, in which men groped apart, and became strangers, and neighborhood and fellowship were lost, as much as they had been in the ancient days. Out of that long period of the Middle Ages there has come to us little that I discover of practical moralizing from the purest and most meditative minds; and the little that we do find is singularly limited in scope. Moral sentiment was absorbed in religious sentiment, and lost its distinctiveness. The Church had

become keeper of consciences; the standards of right were hidden in its confessionals; there was little thought of examining them. Even when the medieval darkness begins to break, and there are monitory voices heard once more, from lips as pure and as noble as have ever spoken for righteousness, the monition is almost strictly a religious one; the appeal for right-doing is made to motives of piety, rather than to the obligation of Right, considered absolutely, in itself. We find it so in the deathbed admonitions that good St. Louis of France addressed to his son, as reported by the Sire de Joinville. We find it in the precepts ascribed to Thomas à Kempis, and in Wyclif's "Short Rule of Life." An exception to it is furnished by the great Jewish Rabbi of the Middle Ages, Moses Maimonides, whose injunctions to his son Abraham, contained in his last will, form a noble moral code. They makė plain the needful showing, that rightness does not lie on the surface of conduct, but has a root that runs deep down into the heart of man and into the everlasting verity of things. They are full, too, of a profound prac tical wisdom. "Accustom yourself," he says, "to good morals; for the nature of man dependeth upon habit, and habit taketh root in nature." "There is no nobility like that of morality, and there is no inheritance like faithfulness." "Let not bill, witnesses, or possession, be stronger in your sight than a promise made by word of mouth, whether in public or in private. Refrain from and disdain all deep reserves, cunning subterfuges, tricky pretexts, sharp practices, and flaws and evasions."

After the Renaissance and the Reformation there came a great revival of attentiveness to the counselling of the young, in definite particulars of conduct and behavior, for their practical guidance through life. The literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is suddenly rich