It is extraordinarily significant that to meet modern ethics there comes in the Late Stoicism a philosophical ethical system in which there appear, as the result of rational thinking, thoughts which run side by side with Christian morality. There is now coming up for the benefit of modern times the seed sown by Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius. Cicero, too, counts with modern times for so much, because its thinkers find in his writings noble morality based upon thought. The discovery of Late Stoicism’s ethic of humanity is for modern times akin to their discovery of nature. They identify it with the real Christian ethic, and contrast it with the scholastic, in which Jesus is expounded according to Aristotle. It is through Late Stoicism that modern times become aware that the moral is something direct. Because Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius speak to such an extent just as Jesus did, they help to spread the conviction that the truly rational ethic and the ethic of the Gospels coincide with one another. When antiquity came to an end, Late Stoicism and Christianity, in spite of the identity of their moral teaching, had torn each other to pieces. In modern times they unite in order to produce together an ethical world-view. Why is that now possible which before was impossible? Because the chasm which lay between their respective world-views has been bridged. Christianity now treats world- and life-affirmation as valid. But how could this volte-face of Christianity be brought about? Because of the fact that in spite of its pessimistic world-view it upholds an ethic which, so far as it touches the relation of man to man, is an activist ethic. The pessimistic world-view, if it thinks itself out to a consistent conclusion, must end with a purely world-denying ethic, [pg 066] divorced from action, as it has in India. The peculiar character, however, of the world-view of Jesus which is determined by the expectation of the end of the world and the coming of a supernatural kingdom of God, together with the directness of his ethical feeling, entail his proclaiming of an ethic of active devotion to one’s fellow-Man in spite of his pessimistic attitude towards the natural world. This activist ethic is what is wanted to provide the cardinal-point of an evolution from a Christian-pessimistic world-view to one of Christian optimism. The modern age, following its instinct, assumes it as self-evident that an ethic which deals with the active relations of man to man is pre-supposed to be an ethic which assigns a positive value to action as such, and, further, that such an ethic of action belongs to a world-view which is optimistic and which wills and hopes for a transformation of relationships.