Yet it was in truth a somewhat melancholy service, a service on which
one must needs move about, solemn, serious, depressed, with the
hushed footsteps of those who move about the house where a dead body
is lying. Such was the impression which occurred to Marius again and
again as he read, with a growing sense of some profound dissidence
from his author. By certain quite traceable links of association he
was reminded, in spite of the moral beauty of the philosophic
emperor's ideas, how he had sat, essentially unconcerned, at the
public shows. For, actually, his contemplations had made him of a
sad heart, inducing in him that melancholy--Tristitia--which even the
monastic moralists have held to be of the nature of deadly sin, akin
to the sin of Desidia or Inactivity. Resignation, a sombre
resignation, a sad heart, patient bearing of the burden of a sad
heart:--Yes! this belonged doubtless to the situation of an honest
thinker upon the world. Only, in this case there seemed to be too
much of a complacent acquiescence in the world as it is. And there
could be no true Theodice in that; no real accommodation of the world
as it is, to the divine pattern of the Logos, the eternal reason,
over against it. It amounted to a tolerance of evil.

The soul of good, though it moveth upon a way thou canst but little
understand, yet prospereth on the journey:

[52] If thou sufferest nothing contrary to nature, there can be
nought of evil with thee therein.

If thou hast done aught in harmony with that reason in which men are
communicant with the gods, there also can be nothing of evil with
thee--nothing to be afraid of: