This view of Providence and of wealth seemed to differ from the one assumed in Isaiah and often stated by Moses and David. For they had taught me that righteousness, and truth, and obedience to parents, and neighbourly kindness, tend to “length of days” and to peace and prosperity on the earth—for the righteous man himself as well as for the community; and they also distinguished honest wealth, acquired by labour, from dishonest wealth acquired by greediness and injustice. But Epictetus here made no such distinction. The Jewish poems recognised it as being, at all events on the surface, a strange thing that a righteous man should be subjected to exceptional, crushing, and continuous calamities by the visitations of God. Epictetus appeared to teach us that God had ordained some men to be restless, pushing, shameless, and greedy, that they may take away the wealth acquired honestly by the good and honest and just. God had made these rascals “better” than the virtuous—in rascality! Then he called on us to admire or accept this ordinance or law: “Why fret, then, fellow? You have the better gift. Remember, therefore, all of you always, and have it by heart and on the lips, _This is a Law of Nature that the better should have—in the province in which he is better—the advantage of the inferior_. Then none of you will fret any more.” In his general theory, Epictetus was careful to separate himself from those who maintain that the Gods do not interfere with the affairs of men, or never interfere except on great and public occasions, and he approved of the words of Ulysses to the Allseeing, quoted by Socrates, “Thou seest my every motion.” If man, he said, can embrace the world in his thought, and if the air and sun can include all things in their influence, why cannot God? But this seemed to lead to the conclusion that the influence of God is being perpetually and ubiquitously exerted on men in order to produce knaves, slaves, tyrants, and fools: for such our Master appeared to deem the majority of mankind. In practice, Epictetus avoided such a blasphemy against God, by drawing no inference as to Providence from any of the laws or institutions of men, for he appeared to regard human institutions as radically bad. At all events he allowed his pupils—as I have shewn above—to say that the rulers of the world are “thieves and robbers” and that the courts of justice are “courts of injustice.” His belief in Providence was—I seemed to see clearly—based on nothing but the consciousness of the Logos within himself. The Logos in the vast majority of mankind appeared to him to have done them no good: so he could not argue from that.