But in order to make us believe that Christianity existed before Christ, those who deny Jesus, have found a rival to Jesus even in Rome, in the very palace of the Cæsars. Seneca, the director of conscience to young gentlemen, leader of the fashionable cult of reformed stoicism; the abstract aristocrat never moved by the troubles of the poor; the proprietor who despises riches, and clutches them tightly, who affirms the equality between free and slave, and owns slaves; the talented anatomist of scruples, of evils, of active vices, and complacent virtues; he who canalized the old doctrine of Chrisippus, dull but clear, towards the estuary of preciosity; moral Seneca they claim was a Christian without knowing it during Christ’s very lifetime. Thumbing over his works (many were written after the death of Christ, for Seneca waited till he was sixty-five years old before committing suicide), they have found that “the wise man does not avenge but forgets affronts,” and that “to imitate the Gods we should do good also to the ungrateful because the sun shines equally on the wicked and the seas bear up the pirate ship,” and finally that “We must succor our enemies with a friendly hand.” But the “forgetting” of the philosopher is not “forgiveness”; and “succor” can be philanthropy but is not love. The imperious, the stoic, the Pharisee; the philosopher proud of his philosophy, the righteous man complacent over his righteousness, can despise the affronts of the small, the pricks of enemies, and through pride of magnanimity and to win admiration can deign to give a loaf to a hungry enemy in order to humiliate him more harshly from the heights of perfection. But that bread was prepared with the leaven of vanity and that would-be friendly hand could never have dried a tear or dressed a wound. The world of antiquity did not know love. It knew passion for a woman, friendship for a friend, justice for the citizen, hospitality for the foreigner; but it did not know love. Zeus protected pilgrims and strangers; he who knocked at the Grecian door was not denied meat, a cup of wine, and a bed. The poor were to be covered, the weak helped, the mourning consoled with fair words; but the men of antiquity did not know love, love that suffers, that shares another’s sorrow, love for all who suffer and are neglected, love for the poor, the lowly, the outlawed, the maligned, the downtrodden, the abandoned; love for all, love which knows no difference between fellow-citizens and strangers, between fair and foul, between criminal and philosopher, between brother and enemy.