The price was too high; mankind would not pay it, and sought a religion elsewhere that had a place for a man's children. [Sidenote: Sin and salvation] Again, in their contempt for the passions the Stoics underestimated their strength. How strong the passions are, no man can guess for another, even if he can be sure how strong his own are. Perhaps the Stoics could subordinate their passions to their reason;--ancient critics kept sharp eyes on them and said they were not always successful.[130] But there is no question that for the mass of men, the Stoic account of reason is absurd. "I see another law in my members," said a contemporary of Seneca's, "warring against the law of my mind and bringing me into captivity." Other men felt the same and sought deliverance in the sacraments of all the religions. That Salvation was not from within, was the testimony of every man who underwent the _taurobolium_. So far as such things can be, it is established by the witness of every religious mind that, whether the feeling is just or not the feeling is invincible that the will is inadequate and that religion begins only when the Stoic's ideal of saving oneself by one's own resolve and effort is finally abandoned. Whether this will permanently be true is another question, probably for us unprofitable. The ancient world, at any rate, and in general the modern world, have pronounced against Stoic Psychology--it was too quick, too superficial. The Stoics did not allow for the sense of sin.[131] They recognized the presence of evil in the world; they felt that "it has its seat within us, in our inward part";[132] and they remark the effect of evil in the blunting of the faculties--let the guilty, says Persius, "see virtue, and pine that they have lost her forever."[133] While Seneca finds himself "growing better and becoming changed," he still feels there may be much more needing amendment.[134] He often {68} expresses dissatisfaction with himself.[135] But the deeper realization of weakness and failure did not come to the Stoics, and what help their teaching of strenuous endeavour could have brought to men stricken with the consciousness of broken willpower, it is hard to see. "Filthy Natta," according to Persius, was "benumbed by vice" (_stupet hic vitio_).[136] "When a man is hardened like a stone (_apolithothe_), how shall we be able to deal with him by argument?" asks Epictetus, arguing against the Academics, who "opposed evident truths"--what are we to do with necrosis of the soul?[137] But the Stoics really gave more thought to fancies of the sage's equality with God and occasional superiority--so confident were they in the powers of the individual human mind. Plutarch, indeed, forces home upon them as a deduction from their doctrine of "the common nature" of gods and men the consequence that sin is not contrary to the Logos of Zeus--and yet they say God punishes sin.[138]