V
But many feel that all these phenomena—cult, doctrine and exegesis, important as they are in the composition of Christianity, are still not the essential matter. Essential Christianity is a state of mind and a rule of life, and its basis is generally held to be the principles of the Sermon on the Mount. But while a great many people assent theoretically to the Sermon on the Mount, no one has ever put it in practice in its entirety and all the time. So-called Christian society is not organized on the lines of the Sermon on the Mount. It is not organized on the principle of self-abnegation tending to self-perfection, but on the principle of the development of the individual as a unit of society, with duties laid upon him by his relation to society, and rights guaranteed him by the society he supports. Our ethics are not conceived as founded on laws god-given and final, but as evolved by the growth of society, and subject to endless and progressive change. Where the interest of society requires that the desires of the bee shall be subordinated to the welfare of the hive, Christian ethics is often called in as an ally; but if it were fully in control, society as now organized would disintegrate. The ethics in which we live and move is that of Roman law, and Roman law is to a considerable extent a practical version of the ethics of the Stoics. Moreover the ethics of the Christian church is based on the doctrine of Ambrose, bishop of Milan, and the doctrine of Ambrose is based on Cicero de Officiis, and Cicero's book is based on the works of Panaetius the Greek stoic of the second century before Christ. Socrates and Plato had long ago bidden men to love their enemies, to take no heed for the morrow, to die rather than do wrong, and to hold their goods in common. The fathers were astounded by the Christlike utterances of these pagans, and cried in admiration that they were Christians before Christianity. When the old scholiast read how Plato's Socrates said that "there is no good thing which is not the gift of the gods," he wrote on his margin: "Every good gift and every perfect gift cometh from above." The anti-national character of Christianity, its determination to ignore frontiers, was anticipated in the Stoic and Cynic movements. The world was full of missionaries, and the itinerant Cynic preacher was very near to the Christian. Epictetus, who exhorted men to remember that they were sons of God, and to make their lives worthy of their divine parentage gives us a picture of the true Cynic apostle. That he may be free to deliver his message to his fellowmen the true Cynic goes as naked, homeless, and houseless, as a Christian apostle. Like the Christian he goes without wife, child and friends, if only he may thereby bring others to a knowledge of themselves and of God. We know of actual cases where Cynics became Christians, and Christians became Cynics, without any very great ado. It was, however, the Stoic system, embedded in Roman institutions, that conquered the world.