I remembered a similar avowal in Isaiah when the prophet declares that his message is “Hear ye indeed, but understand not”; and this, or something like it, was repeated by Jesus and Paul. But Isaiah says, “Lord, how long?” And the reply is that the failure will not be for ever. In the Jewish utterances, there was more pain but also more hope. I preferred them. Nor could I help recalling Paul’s reiterated assertions that everywhere the message of the gospel was a “power,”—sometimes indeed for evil, to those that hardened themselves against it, but more often for good—constraining, taking captive, leading in triumph, and destined in the end to make all things subject to the Son of God. Compared with this, our Master’s doctrine seemed very cold. In the next place, Epictetus addressed himself to the larger and lower class of Cynics, those who were beginning, or who aspired only to the passive life. These he exhorted to set their thoughts on what was their own, on their own advantage or profit—of course interpreting profit in a philosophic sense as being virtue, which is its own reward and is the most profitable thing for every man. It was all, in a sense, very true, but again I felt that it was chilling. It seemed to send me down into myself, groping in the cellars of my own nature, instead of helping me to look up to the sun. Most of it was more or less familiar; and there was one saying that I have quoted above, to the effect that the universe is “badly managed if Zeus does not take care of each one of His own citizens in order that they like Him may be divinely happy.” Now I knew that Epictetus did not use the word _eudæmon_, or divinely happy, referring to the next life, for he did not believe that a “citizen of Zeus” would continue to exist, except as parts of the four elements, in a future life. He meant “in this life.” And if anyone in this life felt unhappy—more particularly, if he “wept”—that was a sign, according to Epictetus, that he was not a “citizen of Zeus.” For he declared that Ulysses, if he wept and bewailed his separation from his home and wife—as Homer says he did—“was not good.” So it came to this, that no man must weep or lament in earnest for any cause, either for the sins or sorrows of others, or for his own, on pain of forfeiting his franchise in the City of Zeus. I had read in the Hebrew scriptures how Noah, and Lot, and others of the “citizens of God,” lived alone amongst multitudes of sinners; but they, and the prophets too, seemed to be afflicted by the sins around them. Also Jesus said in the gospels, “O sinful and perverse generation! How long shall I be with you and bear you!” as though it were a burden to him. And I had come to feel that every good man must in some sense bear the sins and carry the iniquities of his neighbours—especially those of his own household, and his own flesh and blood. So I flinched from these expressions of Epictetus, although I knew that they were quite consistent with his philosophy.