"It is a sin
To steal a pin:
Much more to steal
A greater thing."
This, in spite of its exquisite lyrical expression, the Stoic would flatly deny. The theft of a pin, and the defalcation of a bank cashier for a hundred thousand dollars; a cross word to a dog, and a course of conduct which breaks a woman's heart, are from the Stoic standpoint precisely on a level. For it is not the consequences but the form of our action that is the important thing. It is not how we make other people feel as a result of our act, but how we ourselves think of it, as we propose to do it, or after it is done, that determines its goodness or badness. If I steal a pin, I violate the universal law just as clearly and absolutely as though I stole the hundred thousand dollars. I can no more look with deliberate approval on the cross word to a dog, than on the breaking of a woman's heart. There are things that do not admit of degrees. We must either fire our gun off or not fire it. We cannot fire part of the charge. We want either an absolutely good egg for breakfast, or no egg at all. One that is partially good, or on the line between goodness and badness, we send back as altogether bad. If there is a little round hole in a pane of glass, cut by a bullet, we reject the whole pane as imperfect, just as though a big jagged hole had been made in it by a brickbat. We get an echo of this paradox in the statement of St. James, "For whosoever shall keep the whole law, and yet stumble in one point, he is guilty of all."
This paradox becomes plain, self-evident truth, the moment we admit the Stoic position that not external things, and their appeal to our sensibility, but our internal attitudes toward universal law, are the points on which our virtue hangs. Either we intend to obey the universal law of nature or we do not; and between the intention of obedience and the intention of disobedience there is no middle ground.
Second: The wise man, the Stoic sage, is absolutely perfect, the complete master of himself, and rightfully the ruler of the world. If everything depends on our thought, and our thought is in tune with the universal law, then obviously we are perfect. Beyond such complete inner response to the universal law it is impossible for man to advance.
Curiously enough, the religious doctrine of perfectionism, which often arises in Methodist circles, and in such holiness movements as have taken their rise from the influence of Methodism, shows this same root in the conception of law. Wesley's definition of sin is "the violation of a known law." If that be all there is of sin, then any of us who is ordinarily decent and conscientious, may boast of perfection. You can number perfectionists by tens of thousands on such abstract terms as these. But if sin be not merely deliberate violation of abstract law; if it be failure to fulfil to the highest degree the infinitely delicate personal, domestic, civic, and social relations in which we stand; then the very notion of perfection is preposterous, and the profession of it little less than blasphemy. But like the modern religious perfectionists, the Stoics had little concern for the concrete, individual, personal ties which bind men and women together in families, societies, and states. Perfection was an easy thing, because they had defined it in such abstract terms. Still, though not by any means the whole of virtue as deeper schools have apprehended it, it is something to have our inner motive absolutely right, when measured by the standard of universal law. That at least the Stoic professed to have attained.
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.
To the Stoic, on the contrary, the round world is part of a single universe, which holds all its parts in the grasp and guidance of one universal law, determining each particular event. By making that law of the universe his own, the individual man at once worships the all-controlling Providence, and achieves his own freedom. For the law to which he yields is at once the law of the whole universe, and the law of his own nature as a part of the universe. "We are born subjects," exclaims the Stoic, "but to obey God is perfect liberty." "Everything," says Marcus Aurelius, "harmonises with me which is harmonious to thee, O universe. Nothing for me is too early or too late, which is in due time for thee."
A characteristic prayer and meditation and hymn will show us, far better than description, what this Stoic religion meant to those who devoutly held it. Epictetus gives us this prayer of the dying Cynic: "I stretch out my hands to God and say: The means which I have received from thee for seeing thy administration of the world and following it I have not neglected: I have not dishonoured thee by my acts: see how I have used my perceptions: have I ever blamed thee? have I been discontented with anything that happens or wished it to be otherwise? Have I wished to transgress the relations of things? That thou hast given me life, I thank thee for what thou hast given: so long as I have used the things which are thine I am content; take them back and place them wherever thou mayest choose; for thine were all things,—thou gavest them to me. Is it not enough to depart in this state of mind, and what life is better and more becoming than that of a man who is in this state of mind, and what end is more happy?"