law:[Footnote: Sen. de Ira. i. 14; ii. 27: "Quis est iste qui se
profitetur omnibus legibus innocentem?"] that God is no respecter
of nations, ranks, or conditions, but all, barbarian and Roman,
bond and free, are alike under His all-seeing Providence.[Footnote:
"De Benef.," iii. 18: "Virtus omnes admittit, libertinos, servos,
reges." These and many other passages are collected by Champagny,
ii. 546, after Fabricius and others, and compared with well-known
texts of Scripture. The version of the Vulgate shows a great deal
of verbal correspondence. M. Troplong remarks, after De Maistre,
that Seneca has written a fine book on Providence, for which there
was not even a name at Rome in the time of Cicero.--"L'Influence du
Christianisme," &c., i., ch. 4.]

"St. Paul enjoined submission and obedience even to the tyranny of
Nero, and Seneca fosters no ideas subversive of political
subjection. Endurance is the paramount virtue of the Stoic. To
forms of government the wise man was wholly indifferent; they were
among the external circumstances above which his spirit soared in
serene self-contemplation. We trace in Seneca no yearning for a
restoration of political freedom, nor does he even point to the
senate, after the manner of the patriots of the day, as a
legitimate check to the autocracy of the despot. The only mode, in
his view, of tempering tyranny is to educate the tyrant himself in
virtue. His was the self-denial of the Christians, but without
their anticipated compensation. It seems impossible to doubt that
in his highest flights of rhetoric--and no man ever recommended the
unattainable with a finer grace--Seneca must have felt that he was
labouring to build up a house without foundations; that his system,
as Caius said of his style, was sand without lime. He was surely
not unconscious of the inconsistency of his own position, as a