But it is one thing to be a monotheist, and another to be a child of "Abba Father," and this is one of the notes of the early Christian. It is impossible to over-emphasize the significance of Christian happiness amid the strain and doubt of the early Empire. Zeno and Isis each had something to say, but who had such a message of forgiveness and reconciliation and of the love of God? "God is within you," said Seneca; but he knew nothing of such an experience as the Christian summed up as the "grace of God," "grace sufficient" and "grace {149} abounding." It is hard to think of these familiar phrases being new and strange--the coining of Paul to express what no man had said before--and this at the moment when Seneca was writing his "moral letters" to Lucilius. Verbal coincidences may be found between Paul and Seneca, but they are essentially verbal. The Stoic Spermaticos Logos was a cold and uninspiring dogma compared with "Abba Father" and the Spirit of Jesus--it was not the same thing at all. The one doctrine made man self-sufficient--in the other, "our sufficiency (_hikanotes_) is of God." It was the law of nature, contrasted with the father of the prodigal son--"our kind and tender-hearted father" as Clement of Rome calls him [27]--the personal God, whose "problem is ever to save the flock of men; that is why the good God has sent the good shepherd."[28] The more lettered of Christian writers like to quote Plato's saying that man was born to be at home with God (_oikeios echein pros theon_) and that he was "a heavenly plant." Falsehood, they say, and error obscured all this, but now "that ancient natural fellowship with heaven" has "leapt forth from the darkness and beams upon us."[29] "God," says Clement, "out of his great love for men, cleaves to man, and as when a little bird has fallen out of the nest, the mother-bird hovers over it, and if perchance some creeping beast open its mouth upon the little thing, Wheeling o'er his head, with screams the dam Bewails her darling brood; so God the Father seeks his image, and heals the fall, and chases away the beast, and picks up the little one again."[30]