Seneca and Epictetus and Lucian and M. Aurelius all alike give a gloomy picture of the moral condition of the masses. And we may well believe that, in spite of the splendour of that age, in spite of a great moral movement which was stirring among the leaders of society, the mass of men, as in every age, had little taste for idealist views of life. Yet Seneca, notwithstanding his pessimism, speaks of the multitudes who were stretching out their hands for moral help. There must have been some demand for that popular moral teaching which is a striking feature of the time. Men might jeer at the philosophic missionary, but they seem to have crowded to listen to him—on the temple steps of Rome or Ephesus, in the great squares of Alexandria,(1813) or in the colonnades at Olympia, or under the half-ruined walls of an old Milesian colony on the Euxine.(1814) The rush of the porters and smiths and carpenters to join the ranks of the Cynic friars, which moved the scorn of Lucian,(1815) must have corresponded to some general demand, even if the motive of the vagrant missionary was not of the purest kind. There must have been many an example of moral earnestness like that of Hermotimus, who had laboured hard for twenty years to find the true way of life, and had only obtained a distant glimpse of the celestial city.(1816) After Dion’s conversion, as we may fairly call it, he deems it a sacred duty to call men to the way of wisdom by persuasion or reproach, and to appeal even to the turbulent masses.(1817) We shall see how well he fulfilled the duty. For nearly a century at Athens, the gentle Demonax embodied the ideal which his friend Epictetus had formed of the Cynic father of all men in God; and his immense ascendency testifies at least to a widespread respect and admiration for such teaching and example.(1818) It is not necessary to suppose that the people who thought it an honour if Demonax invited himself to their tables, the magistrates who rose up to do him reverence as he passed, or the riotous assembly which was awed into stillness by his mere presence, were people generally who had caught his moral enthusiasm.(1819) They were at the very time eager to have gladiatorial shows established under the shadow of the Acropolis. But it is something when men begin to revere a character inspired by moral forces of which they have only a dim conjecture. And amid all the material splendour and apparent content of the Antonine age, there were signs that men were becoming conscious of a great spiritual need, which they often tried to satisfy by accumulated superstitions. The ancient routine was broken up; the forms of ancestral piety no longer satisfied even the vulgar; the forms of ancient scholastic speculation had become stale and frigid to the cultivated; the old philosophies had left men bewildered. Henceforth, philosophy must make itself a religion; the philosopher must become an “ambassador of God.”