There is, indeed, another side to the picture. The vague uncertainty with which the best pagans regarded death passed away before the teaching of the Church, and it was often replaced by a rapture of hope, which, however, the doctrine of purgatory contributed at a later period largely to quell. But, whatever may be thought of the justice of the Catholic conception of death or of its influence upon human happiness, it is plain that it is radically different from that of the pagan philosophers. That man is not only an imperfect but a fallen being, and that death is the penal consequence of his sin, was a doctrine profoundly new to mankind, and it has exercised an influence of the most serious character upon the moral history of the world. The wide divergence of the classical from the Catholic conception of death appears very plainly in the attitude which each system adopted towards suicide. This is, perhaps, the most striking of all the points of contrast between the teaching of antiquity, and especially of the Roman Stoics, on the one hand, and that of almost all modern moralists on the other. It is indeed true that the ancients were by no means unanimous in their approval of the act. Pythagoras, to whom so many of the wisest sayings of antiquity are ascribed, is said to have forbidden men “to depart from their guard or station in life without the order of their commander, that is, of God.”(302) Plato adopted similar language, though he permitted suicide when the law required it, and also when men had been struck down by intolerable calamity, or had sunk to the lowest depths of poverty.(303) Aristotle condemned it on civic grounds, as being an injury to the State.(304) The roll of Greek suicides is not long, though it contains some illustrious names, among others those of Zeno and Cleanthes.(305) In Rome, too, where suicide acquired a greater prominence, its lawfulness was by no means accepted as an axiom, and the story of Regulus, whether it be a history or a legend, shows that the patient endurance of suffering was once the supreme ideal.(306) Virgil painted in gloomy colours the condition of suicides in the future world.(307) Cicero strongly asserted the doctrine of Pythagoras, though he praised the suicide of Cato.(308) Apuleius, expounding the philosophy of Plato, taught that “the wise man never throws off his body except by the will of God.”(309) Cæsar, Ovid, and others urged that in extreme distress it is easy to despise life, and that true courage is shown in enduring it.(310) Among the Stoics themselves, the belief that no man may shrink from a duty co-existed with the belief that every man has a right to dispose of his own life. Seneca, who emphatically advocated suicide, admits that there were some who deemed it wrong, and he himself attempted to moderate what he termed “the passion for suicide”, that had arisen among his disciples.(311) Marcus Aurelius wavers a little on the subject, sometimes asserting the right of every man