“Hence that picturesque contrast (in the lecture you transcribed for me) between the unmarried and the married Cynic—which, besides the similarity of thought, contains some curious similarities to the actual words of Paul. It ran thus, ‘The condition of the times being such as it is, opposing forces, as it were, being drawn up in line of battle’—that was his expression. Well, what followed from this non-existent, hypothetical, imminent conflict? The Philosopher, it seems, must be a soldier, ‘_undistracted_, wholly devoted to the ministry of God, able to go about and visit men, not bound fast to private personal duties, not _entangled_ in conditions of life that he cannot honourably transgress.’ And then he describes at great length a married Cynic dragged down from his royal throne by the claims and encumbrances of a nursery. Now this same ‘undistractedness’ (using the very word) of unmarried life Paul himself has mentioned in a letter to the Corinthians, where he says that ‘owing to the pressing necessity’ of the times, it was good for a man to be unmarried, and that he wished them to be ‘free from anxiety.’ He concludes ‘But I speak this for your own profit, not that I may cast a noose round you but that you may with all seemliness attend on the Lord _undistractedly_.’ Again, he writes to one of his assistants or subalterns, ‘Endure hardship with me as a good soldier of Christ Jesus. No one engaged in a campaign is _entangled_’—your friend’s word again—‘in the affairs of civil life.’ “I lay little stress on the similarity of word, but a great deal on the similarity of thought. There is no such conflict as Epictetus describes. There is no such ‘line of battle’—not at least for us, Romans, or for you, Cynics. But _there is for the Christians_—arrayed as they are against the authorities of the Empire. And that reminds me of your Epictetian antithesis between ‘the Beast’ and ‘the Man.’ It is a little like a Christian tradition about ‘the Beast.’ By ‘the Beast’ they mean Nero. They have never forgotten his treatment of them after the fire. For a long time after his death they had a notion—I believe some of them have it still—that the Beast may rise from the dead and persecute them again. They also expect—I cannot do more than allude to their fantastic dreams—a sort of ‘Son of Man’ to appear on the clouds taking vengeance on the armies of the Beast. So, you see, they, too, recognise an opposition between the Man and the Beast. Only, with the Christians it is of a date much earlier than Epictetus. It goes back to a Jewish tradition, which represents a sort of opposition between the empires of Beasts and the empire of the Son of Man, in a prophet named Daniel, some centuries ago.