Third: The Stoic is a citizen of the whole world. Local, domestic, national ties bind him not. But this is a cheap way of gaining universality,--this skipping the particulars of which the universal is composed. To be as much interested in the politics of Rio Janeiro or Hong Kong as you are in those of the ward of your own city does not mean much until we know how much you are interested in the politics of your own ward. And in the case of the Stoic this interest was very attenuated. As is usually the case, extension of interest to the ends of the earth was purchased at the cost of defective intensity close at home, where charity ought to begin. As a matter of fact the Stoics were very defective in their standards of citizenship. Still, what the law of justice demanded, that they were disposed to render to every man; and thus, though on a very superficial basis, the Stoics laid the broad foundation of an international democracy which knows no limits of colour, race, or stage of development. Though Stoicism falls far short of the warmth and devotion of modern Christian missions, yet the early stage of the missionary movement, in which people were interested, not in the concrete welfare of specific peoples, but in vast aggregates of "souls," represented on maps, and in diagrams, bears a close resemblance to the Stoic cosmopolitanism. We have all seen people who would give and work to save the souls of the heathen, who would never under any circumstances think of calling on the neighbour on the same street who chanced to be a little below their own social circle. The soul of a heathen is a very abstract conception; the lowly neighbour a very concrete affair. The Stoics are not the only people who have deceived themselves with vast abstractions. VI THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF STOICISM The Stoics had a genuine religion. The Epicureans, too, had their gods, but they never took them very seriously. In a world made up of atoms accidentally grouped in transient relations, of which countless accidental groupings I happen to be one, there is no room for a real religious relationship. Consequently the Epicurean, though he amused himself with poetic pictures of gods who led lives of undisturbed serenity, unconcerned about the affairs of men, had no consciousness of a great spiritual whole of which he was a part, or of an Infinite Person to whom he was personally related.