Suicide, which to the modern conscience appears a censurable act, was by most of the Roman moralists regarded with unqualified approval,[609] provided the person committing the act had a strong motive for doing so. Epictetus said, “The door is open”; but added this admonition, “Do not depart without a reason.”[610] But almost any circumstance which made life hard or a burden would justify the act; “The house is smoky, and I quit it,” calmly remarks the Stoic Emperor Aurelius.[611] Seneca says, “The eternal law has decreed nothing better than this, that life should have but one entrance and many exits.”[612] He thinks the gods must have looked on with great joy when Cato, with the world fallen into Cæsar’s power, drove the sword into his own breast. That in his view was “a glorious and memorable departure.” By such an act a man raises himself to the level of the gods.[613] Suicide was at its height in the early Empire. This is to be explained by the teachings of the Stoics--among whom suicides were numerous[614]--and the unbearable tyranny of the imperial régime. Not till Christianity came with its teachings regarding the sacredness of human life and the duty of resignation was there any essential change in the general attitude of the ancient world toward the act of self-destruction.[615] [Sidenote: The insufficiency of Stoicism as a moral guide for the masses] The composite Greco-Roman ideal, in which Stoicism had united the best elements of the Greek and the Roman type of character, while it did serve as a guide to the moral strivings of select souls, was wholly unfitted to give support to the moral life of the masses or to awaken in them moral enthusiasm. There were in Stoicism two serious defects which made it impossible for it to become the guide and rule of life for the multitude. First, it was too intellectually exalted and cold to make appeal to the common people. The Stoics, in the suppression of the feelings and emotions,--“they made solitude in the heart and called it peace,”[616]--cut themselves off from all sympathy with the masses, with whom feeling is ever the larger part of life. Second, Stoicism failed to give due place to the religious sentiment. Belief in the ancestral Roman gods had, it is true, been undermined, but the religious feeling of awe and mystery in the presence of the Unseen was deeper and more universal than ever before. Man, in the fine phrase of Sabatier, is incurably religious. The ideal of character which shall appeal to the masses must be an ideal whose requirements make full recognition of the rightful claims of human affections and of the religious instinct of mankind. The mystical and religious East contributes to the ideal created by the interaction of the Greek and the Roman spirit those elements which neither of the classical cultures could supply. [Sidenote: The Orient contributes new elements to the moral life of the West]