Remember, says Epictetus, so to act your part upon this stage as to be approved by the master, whether it be a short or a long one that he has given you to perform. If he will have you to represent a beggar, endeavour to act the beggar’s part well; and so, a cripple, a prince, or a plebeian. It is your part to perform well what you represent: it is his to choose what that shall be. Thus spake the stoic philosopher. And how speaks the Christian divine? As the merit of an actor, says Robert Hall, is not estimated by the part which he performs, but solely by the truth and propriety of his representation, and the peasant is often applauded where the monarch is hissed; so when the great drama of life is concluded, He who allots its scenes and determines its period will take an account of His servants, and assign to each his due, in his own proper character. Since the life of man is likened to a scene, “I had rather,” writes John Milton, “that all my entrances and exits might mix with such persons only whose worth erects them and their actions to a grave and tragic deportment, and not to have to do with clowns and vices.” And this, lest such a player have to echo, in spirit, if not to the letter, the bitter conviction of blinded, blundering Leontes—_Io anche_— “And I Play too; but so disgraced a part, whose issue Will hiss me to my grave.” The measure of a happy life, writes Lord Shaftesbury—he of the “Characteristics”—is not from the fewer or more suns we behold, the fewer or more breaths we draw, or meals we repeat; but from the having once lived well, acted our part handsomely, and made our exit cheerfully—or, to print it as he wrote it, for the lovers of old books’ sake—“and made our _Exit_ cheerfully, and as became us.” It is well remarked by Archbishop Trench that we have forfeited the full force of the statement, “God is no respecter of _persons_,” from the fact that “person” does not mean for us now all that it once meant. “Person,” from “persona,” the mask constantly worn by the actor of antiquity, is by natural transfer the part or _rôle_ in the play which each sustains, as πρόσωπον is in Greek. “In the great tragi-comedy of life each sustains a ‘person;’ one that of a king, another that of a hind; one must play Dives, another Lazarus. This ‘person’ God, for whom the question is not _what_ ‘person’ each sustains, but _how_ he sustains it, does not regard.” _PHARAOH’S ALTERNATIONS OF AMENDMENT AND RELAPSE._ EXODUS vii.-x., _passim_.