Not that I was as yet convinced that Christ had actually risen from the dead. For I did not yet feel sure that Paul might not have been deceived by himself and by the Christians. But I did now feel sure that Paul was honest and did not knowingly deceive his readers. And it was becoming more and more difficult to believe that self-deception or Christian deception could have produced effects on multitudes of men so great and permanent as those which were plainly discernible in the epistles. I remember at this time trying to prevent my growing admiration for Paul’s work from blinding me to his defects. Such phrases as “let him be anathema,” and “dogs,” and “whose belly is their glory,” and “I would that those who are thus desolating you would even emasculate themselves”—these and others I marked with red in my volume. I knew Epictetus would have condemned them. But I soon perceived that these fiery flashes of wrath were reserved for those whom Paul regarded as proud and greedy ensnarers and oppressors of helpless souls; proud of knowledge that was no knowledge; greedy of money and influence to which they had no right; shutting their eyes against the light, and dragging back poor pilgrims just as they were on the point of entering into the City of Truth. Towards others, even if they might have appeared as rivals, he seemed to me to feel no rivalry, merging all such feeling in allegiance to Christ. Some, he said to the Philippians, preached Christ “thinking to add affliction” to his bonds, out of jealousy and spite. “What then?” he says, “Whatever may be the motive, Christ is preached, and I rejoice. Yea, and I will rejoice.” In the same spirit he wrote to the church of Corinth concerning those among them who said, “I am of Apollos,” “I am of Cephas,” “I am of Paul”—condemning all partisanship, although he gently reminds them of his singular relation to them, “Even though ye have ten thousand tutors in Christ, yet ye have not many fathers: for in Christ Jesus through the Gospel I begot you.” Another detail interested me. Paul (I found) differed greatly from Epictetus in physical constitution, Epictetus used to teach us that a Cynic had no business to be “infirm” of body. At all events, he said, no such person can do the work of a Cynic Missionary. When he extolled “the sceptre of Diogenes,” he used to tell a story of the way in which that philosopher, lying by the roadside, sick of a fever, called on the wayfarers to admire him. It was the road to Olympia, and people were on the way to the games: “Villains!” he shouted to them, “Stay! Are you going all that way to Olympia to see athletes fight or perish, and will you not stay to behold a contest between a man and a fever?” But this contest, I think, ended in Diogenes’s death. As a rule, both he and Socrates had been perfectly and robustly healthy: and Epictetus seemed somewhat to despise those who were otherwise.