À Kempis soars on the wings of love through the spirit world at home amongst the angels; while the Stoic trudges drearily along the hard, bleak road of logic; and once more logic is convicted of futility as a complete guide to life. Follow reason, said the Stoic: reason tells you that you can guide your own destinies and mould your own inner life: rely on yourself, since you can rely on nobody else: be self-sufficient. This self-sufficiency was the parent of hardness and at times of an unlovely spiritual pride. Aurelius seems to thank God that he is not as the rest of men; he is better than the pharisee only in that he pities the publican and acknowledges that he himself has that within him which could lead him to lower depths did he cease to follow the Stoic ascesis; but his pity has frequently something of spiritual disdain and contempt in it. Yet he is not wholly proud; there is in him a certain modesty and self-suppression which often in its expression reminds us of sayings of à Kempis; but he never learnt to think: “We are all frail; but do thou think no one more frail than thyself.” “If thou wouldst know and learn anything useful, love to be unknown and esteemed as nothing; this is the highest and most profitable lesson, truly to know and despise oneself”; or with St. Paul “who is weak and I am not weak.” But we should not expect unaided reason to reach these heights. À Kempis himself tells us that light comes to the soul only when reason is transcended by faith and love: “If thou reliest more upon thine own reason or industry than upon the virtue that subjects to Jesus Christ, thou wilt seldom and hardly be an enlightened man; for God will have us perfectly subject to Himself, and to transcend all reason by ardent love.” “Reason transcended by ardent love”: in this is expressed the whole relation between Christianity and all systems that rely on reason alone. The soul itself in all its aspirations is, as Tertullian said, naturally Christian, and it is only by a Procrustean torture that it can be forced into any other system.