of society was becoming, how desperate the minds of men, during those
frightful centuries which immediately preceded the Christian era, and
how fast was approaching that dark chaos of unbelief and
unrighteousness, which Paul of Tarsus so analyses and describes in the
first chapter of his Epistle to the Romans--when the old light was lost,
the old faiths extinct, the old reverence for the laws of family and
national life, destroyed, yea even the natural instincts themselves
perverted; that chaos whose darkness Juvenal, and Petronius, and Tacitus
have proved, in their fearful pages, not to have been exaggerated by the
more compassionate though more righteous Jew.

And now observe, that this selfishness--this wholesome state of
equilibrium--this philosophic calm, which is really only a lazy pride,
was, as far as we can tell, the main object of all the schools from the
time of Alexander to the Christian era. We know very little of those
Sceptics, Cynics, Epicureans, Academics, Peripatetics, Stoics, of whom
there has been so much talk, except at second-hand, through the Romans,
from whom Stoicism in after ages received a new and not ignoble life.
But this we do know of the later sets, that they gradually gave up the
search for truth, and propounded to themselves as the great type for a
philosopher, How shall a man save his own soul from this evil world?
They may have been right; it may have been the best thing to think about
in those exhausted and decaying times: but it was a question of ethics,
not of philosophy, in the sense which the old Greek sages put on that
latter word. Their object was, not to get at the laws of all things,
but to fortify themselves against all things, each according to his
scheme, and so to be self-sufficient and alone. Even in the Stoics, who
boldly and righteously asserted an immutable morality, this was the
leading conception. As has been well said of them: