No one would pretend to say that there are definite traces of Christian influence in these lofty thoughts. Indeed one’s mind naturally turns from them to similar musings in the _Somnium Scipionis_ of Cicero, and elsewhere. We remember too the noble surmises of Plato respecting the soul’s immortality; and how Cato, the Stoic, improved on his Stoicism, by indulging in lofty views of a future life, drawn from this source, before his suicide. Yet one cannot but feel that Seneca, at times, nearly reached the truth, and owed to the influence of the religion of Jesus on the age in which he lived, much of the peculiar excellence of his philosophy. If from him we turn to Epictetus, we see one still more steadily approaching the light. He seems almost more than a pagan philosopher, but less than a Christian disciple. His discourses preserved to us by the care of Arrian, who wrote in Greek what he heard as the disciple of the philosopher, show a pious spirit and a disrelish for the harsher doctrines of the Stoic system. They bear in some parts a striking likeness to the teachings of the Gospel. Just as our Saviour taught that he who humbleth himself shall be exalted, and that the soul needed His care, as a sick man needs a physician: so we read in Epictetus, “The beginning of philosophy is, according to those who enter, even as they ought, through this gate to her, a perception of their weakness and powerlessness in necessary matters ... Does the philosopher beseech men to listen to him? What doctor asks that any one should suffer himself to be healed by him? Although I hear that at Rome now, doctors call patients to them, yet in my time, they were called to their patients. I invite you to come and hear that you are ill; that you take care of anything rather than what is worthy of care; that you are ignorant of good and evil; that you are unhappy and wretched. The school of the philosopher is a doctor’s shop, from which one should go away, not joyful, but suffering: for you did not come to it whole, but sick, one with a dislocated shoulder, another afflicted with a tumour, another with an ulcer, and another with headache[48].” We find also how clearly he saw the necessity for divine aid in doing right, and the need for submission to the divine will, self-will being cast aside. He says, “Call to mind, man, what is said about tranquillity, liberty, magnanimity. Lift up your head now, like one freed from slavery. Dare at length, with eyes raised to GOD, to say, ‘Henceforth deal with me as thou wilt: Thy thought is my thought; Thy will the same as mine; I refuse nothing that seemeth good to Thee. Lead me whither Thou wilt. Clothe me as Thou wilt. Dost Thou wish me to lead a public life, to live in private, to remain, to flee, to be in need, to abound with wealth? I will defend Thee as to all these dispensations of thy providence before men: I will show what is the nature of each. Cleanse Thou Thine own. Of