His biting sarcasms on those who exercise the art of Magic are conceived in the same spirit of lofty reverence for the Divine Nature,[118] and he would fain believe in the immortality of the soul as a stimulus to virtue and self-abnegation in the present life.[119] The philosophers are marked by the same strenuous seriousness as the poets. The letters of Seneca to Lucilius are still an Enchiridion for those that love virtue, and though there were, doubtless, in the ranks of the philosophers some who deserved the ferocity of Juvenal; some who laid themselves open to the sarcasms of Seneca’s friend, Marcellinus;[120] some like Euxenus, an early teacher of Apollonius of Tyana, “who did not care much to conform the actions of his life” to the tenets of the philosophy he professed;[121] some who resembled the Cynics who haunted the streets and temple gates of Alexandria, and did nothing, as Dion said, “but teach fools to laugh at Philosophy;”[122] yet it is beyond controversy that philosophers at this time were generally recognized as the moral teachers of society, and contributed largely, both as domestic chaplains like Fronto, and evangelistic preachers like Apollonius of Tyana, to the spread of that virtue whose praise and admiration are so conspicuous and sincere in the Greek and Roman writers of the period. The contrast presented by the Sophists, with their artificial graces and their luxurious lives, only served to emphasize the worth of the true philosopher, and when a Sophist turned round upon his career, and determined to lead a virtuous life, he joined the ranks of those who professed philosophy.[123] One of the most frequently recurrent signs of the essential love of virtue exhibited by this age is the constant and strenuous insistence that practice must conform to profession; and that hypocrisy is almost in the condition of a cardinal vice. It may, of course, be asserted that the passionate eagerness displayed touching the importance of being true in act to the explicit utterances of Philosophy is but a sign of conscious weakness in well-doing; and that a truer virtue would have given effect to itself without all this noisy preaching. But a recognition of one’s own feebleness has subsequently become one of the most lauded elements of the saintly character, and it is given to very few to blossom gently and naturally into that goodness which does neither strive nor cry. Juvenal’s diatribes against the Egnatii of Rome are not very different in language, and hardly different at all in spirit, from the attacks of New Testament writers on hypocritical members of the Churches. So far as Greece was concerned, this love of sincerity was but a return—from a somewhat distant lapse—to the ideal of personal openness presented in the famous words of Achilles:— “For like hell mouth I loath Who holds not in his words and thoughts one indistinguished troth.”[124]