“Next remember that you are also a brother: the doing of what is fitting in this capacity involves giving way to him, yielding to his persuasion, speaking well of him, never setting up a rival claim to him in those things that are beyond the control of the will, but gladly letting them go that you may have the advantage in those things which the will controls. “Next, if you are a senator of any city, remember that you are a senator: if a youth, that you are a youth: if an old man, that you are an old man: if a father, that you are a father. For in each of these cases the consideration of the name you bear will suggest to you what is fitting to be done in relation to it.” This view of right moral conduct as being determined by the natural relations in which one man stands to another, and as constituting what is Fitting in regard to those relations, had overspread the Roman world. But in that world the philosophical theory which lay behind the conception of the Fitting was less prominent than the conception itself, and two other terms, both of which were natural and familiar to the Roman mind, came into use to express it. The one was borrowed from the idea of the functions which men have to discharge in the organization of civil government, the other from the idea of a debt. The former of these, “_officium_,” has not passed in this sense outside the Latin language: the latter, “_debitum_,” is familiar to us under its English form “duty.” On the higher plane of his teaching Epictetus expresses moral philosophy in terms of theology. Human life begins and ends in God. Moral conduct is a sublime religion. I will ask you to listen to a short _cento_ of passages, strung loosely together, in which his teaching is expressed:— “‘We also are His offspring.’ Every one of us may call himself a son of God.[260] Just as our bodies are linked to the material universe,[261] subject while we live to the same forces, resolved when we die into the same elements,[262] so by virtue of reason our souls are linked to and continuous with Him, being in reality parts and offshoots of Him.[263] There is no movement of which He is not conscious, because we and He are part of one birth and growth;[264] to Him ‘all hearts are open, all desires known;’[265] as we walk or talk or eat, He Himself is within us, so that we are His shrines, living temples and incarnations of Him.[266] By virtue of this communion with Him we are in the first rank of created things:[267] we and He together form the greatest and chiefest and most comprehensive of all organizations.[268]