The inadequacy of Aurelius’ teaching is brought out most clearly in the shallow optimism with which he tries to conjure away all the sufferings of life. Nothing can be more unreal than his attitude towards evil. We turn to à Kempis and at once we are struck by the contrast. Suffering and evil are for à Kempis an intense reality. He does not attempt to waive them away with the magic formula “Never mind.” No; it is because they are realities, often terrible realities, that they are the most precious things in life with the power to transmute the human into the Divine. He recognises that no ordinary motive can reconcile frail humanity to the trials of life; that many are ready to follow Jesus to the breaking of bread but few to the drinking of the chalice of His passion; that only an ardent personal love and loyalty to Christ can induce men to take up their cross and follow Him, Who has gone before bearing His cross. When suffering is borne in this spirit it loses the unreasonableness which besets all other explanations of it. It becomes the greatest of blessings; it makes us indeed like unto God. How ineffectual beside this spirit of suffering for love are the cold formularies with which, as by magic spells, the Stoic would benumb human pain. Take for instance the much-quoted passage from the end of the second book: “Of human life the duration is a point; the substance is fleeting; the perception is dull; and the fabric of the whole body subject to rottenness; the soul is an idle whirling and fortune hard to divine, and fame a thing devoid of judgment. In short, all that there is of the body is a stream and all that there is of the soul a dream and a vapour. Life is a warfare and a sojourning in a strange country, and after-fame is oblivion. What then is that which can conduct a man? One thing, and only one, philosophy.” But he himself found, as many have found, that sorrow is not banished nor the riddle of life solved by philosophy.