Now I pass to another matter, not of great interest to me at the time, but of great importance to me in its results, because it led to my first knowledge—that could be called knowledge—of the followers of the Lord Jesus Christ. It arose from a passage in the lecture I described in my last chapter. Epictetus was speaking about “the whole frame of things” as being a kind of fluid, in which the thrill of one portion affects all the rest, and about God and the Guardian Dæmon as feeling our every motion and thought. He concluded by calling on us to take an oath—a military oath, or _sacramentum_, as we call it in Latin—such as soldiers take to the Emperor. “They,” he said, “taking on themselves the life of service for pay, swear to prefer above all things the safety of Cæsar. You, who have been counted worthy of such vast gifts, will you not likewise swear, and, after taking your oath, abide by it? And what shall the oath be? Never to disobey, never to accuse, never to find fault with any of the gifts that have been given by Him; never to do reluctantly, never to suffer reluctantly, anything that may be necessary. This oath is like theirs—after a fashion. The soldiers of Cæsar swear not to prefer another to him; God’s soldiers swear to prefer themselves to everything.” On me this came somewhat as bathos. But it was a frequent paradox with him; and of course, in one sense, it was not a paradox but common sense. What he meant by bidding us “prefer _ourselves_” was “prefer _virtue_,” which he always described as each man’s true “profit.” Everyone, he said, must prefer his own “profit” to everything else, even to father, brothers, children, wife. Zeus Himself—so he taught—prefers His own “profit”—which consists in being Father of all. Take away this thin veil of apparent egotism, and the oath might be described as an oath to live and die for righteousness, for the Logos or Word of God within us, and, thus, for God Himself. But why, I thought, disguise loyalty under the mask of self-seeking? This notion of a military oath taken to God, and at the same time to oneself—and an oath, so to speak, of negative allegiance, not to do this or that—did not inspire me with the same enthusiasm as the more positive doctrine and the picture of the wandering Cynic going about the world and actively doing good and destroying evil.