The Stoical philosophy was admirably fitted to preside over this extension of sympathies. Although it proved itself in every age the chief school of patriots, it recognised also, from the very first, and in the most unequivocal manner, the fraternity of mankind. The Stoic taught that virtue alone is a good, and that all other things are indifferent; and from this position he inferred that birth, rank, country, or wealth are the mere accidents of life, and that virtue alone makes one man superior to another. He taught also that the Deity is an all-pervading Spirit, animating the universe, and revealed with especial clearness in the soul of man; and he concluded that all men are fellow-members of a single body, united by participation in the same Divine Spirit. These two doctrines formed part of the very first teaching of the Stoics, but it was the special glory of the Roman teachers, and an obvious result of the condition of affairs I have described, to have brought them into full relief. One of the most emphatic as well as one of the earliest extant assertions of the duty of “charity to the human race,”(372) occurs in the treatise of Cicero upon duties, which was avowedly based upon Stoicism. Writing at a period when the movement of amalgamation had for a generation been rapidly proceeding,(373) and adopting almost without restriction the ethics of the Stoics, Cicero maintained the doctrine of universal brotherhood as distinctly as it was afterwards maintained by the Christian Church. “This whole world,” he tells us, “is to be regarded as the common city of gods and men.”(374) “Men were born for the sake of men, that each should assist the others.”(375) “Nature ordains that a man should wish the good of every man, whoever he may be, for this very reason, that he is a man.”(376) “To reduce man to the duties of his own city and to disengage him from duties to the members of other cities, is to break the universal society of the human race.”(377) “Nature has inclined us to love men, and this is the foundation of the law.”(378) The same principles were reiterated with increasing emphasis by the later Stoics. Adopting the well-known line which Terence had translated from Menander, they maintained that man should deem nothing human foreign to his interest. Lucan expatiated with all the fervour of a Christian poet upon the time when “the human race will cast aside its weapons, and when all nations will learn to love.”(379) “The whole universe,” said Seneca, “which you see around you, comprising all things, both divine and human, is one. We are members of one great body. Nature has made us relatives when it begat us from the same materials and for the same destinies. She planted in us a mutual love, and fitted us for a social life.”(380) “What is a Roman knight, or freedman, or slave? These are but names springing from ambition or from injury.”(381) “I know that my country is the world, and my