responsibilities of their absorbing public cares to think much about happiness, or indeed to think much about themselves at all. They were citizens first and men afterwards; the individual in those days had hardly disentangled his individuality from the State of which he was a member, so as to realise that he was a man, with personal responsibilities, experiences, and destinies, which no one else could share. In the palmy days of Athens, when Pericles ruled and Socrates taught, a man thought as a citizen, wrought as a citizen, and philosophised as a citizen; and except in his relations as a citizen he would have found himself utterly at sea in the conduct of his life. In still earlier stages of civilisation, in the tribe, a man is hardly a person. He is like the limb or organ of a greater body, his tribe; and out of that unity he is nought. Now there is something which is not without beauty and nobleness in this earliest form of human society, in which the man hardly realises his 'self' except in relation to his fellows. But as society progresses and rises towards the higher stages, this primitive order of things breaks up and vanishes. Man has to be placed under the strongest stimulus to personal development; he has to be stirred and trained to understand his relations and duties as a personal being, as the condition of his entering into the highest and most fruitful relations with his fellow men in the State and in the Church. He must be made to feel his individual relations, primarily to God and then to his fellows, and thus only can State life and Church life put on their finest forms and bear their most perfect fruits. This is the end at which Christianity aims. It will isolate men first, press on them the duties and responsibilities of their individual being, lead them to cry, as if it were the one concern for them in the universe, 'What must I do to be saved,' and then, when their whole nature, body, soul and spirit, is in full development and activity, it will create out of the union of these individuals a higher condition of society than the primi

GROWTH OF INDIVIDUALISM.

9

tive form of human relations could possibly have secured. The highest state possible to a community is attained when there is a principle brought to bear that, on the one hand, gives to the man the strongest stimulus to individual development, and, on the other, compacts most closely his relations with his fellow men. The Jew in the old world made an approximation to this condition within the limits of his national life. God's commandment was addressed to him from the first as a person, one who had personal relations with the invisible and eternal, while the tie which bound together the individuals of the race, remains the strongest nexus of man to man which even to this day is known to history. The problem, How this condition is to be realised for humanity at large, is the problem which has been solved by Christianity. The object of Christianity is to 'present every man perfect,' while at the same time it links him closely to the brotherhood of the Universal Church.

That process of individualisation, if we may so call it, which was accomplished nobly for the Jew by the Revelation of the Divine law, and for man at large by the Advent, was achieved more painfully for the Greek by all the strife, degradation and misery of the generations of Hellenic decay. When the liberty of Athens was destroyed, the citizen had no longer a State to live for; patriotism died down for want of a country to love. It was in Athens that a teacher of the New Academy declared that a philosopher would not much trouble himself if his country were enslaved. Athens was enslaved, or such a thought would never have occurred to an Athenian moralist. But liberty being lost, political life being utter humiliation, the strong hand and the brutal will ruling everywhere, mercenary soldiering having supplanted patriotic military service, there being no principle anywhere to fight for, and no empire of tolerable dignity to serve, men fell back upon themselves. At any rate, they

said to themselves, amid the universal impoverishment and misery, I am here, a living being, with a wonderful capacity for enjoying and suffering, and I must look to myself, and enjoy, as far as I may, my own individual life. Then arose

that new philosophical question as to personal conduct and happiness which gave birth to the Epicurean and Stoic Schools, and for the next three hundred years occupied the whole field of Philosophy; for even with the Sceptic, who asserted that nothing could be certainly known, the fundamental consideration was a quiet life.

The question of happiness as the aim of life first comes to the front in the Ethics of Aristotle, and its appearance is the sign of the changed condition of public affairs. In Aristotle's days, in fact, the State was already in decadence. But Aristotle's 'happiness' was a noble and beautiful idea. It was the energetic play of all man's best and highest powers in their proper tasks. The strain of effort and the sense of victorious achievement were its factors; the happy man was the man whose whole nature was in full activity about its noblest work. But the question had come to have a much narrower meaning in the days when the Epicureans and the Stoics appeared. Noble work was then a hard thing to find; great ideas had been banished from the minds of men; great principles ceased to influence the movements of societies. On all sides there was a scramble of selfishness, and it was the selfish idea of happiness, the passive idea, that was uppermost in the minds of men when these sects arose. How a man could get his bit of happiness for himself and enjoy it-it was all that was left to him was the main theme of Philosophy till the Gospel 'Whosoever will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me,' was preached to the world.

Let us understand that it is a very necessary process,

THE SUCCESSORS OF SOCRATES.

Self, but not for Self.

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this distinction of the individual man from the communityhis extrication as a being with personal responsibilities and destinies, from the family, tribe, or state, with which in the earlier stages of his development his life is bound up. This extrication from the communal life, this differentiation, so to speak, is the first condition of man's advance to the higher grades of civilisation, in which with his fully realised and developed manhood he will enter into higher forms of political combination with his fellows, and fill a larger and nobler sphere. It may be said this is a development of selfishness; in a sense, yes. It is the full unfolding of The man who, under a strong sense of personal misery, is moved to cry out for his own salvation, is the man who comes ultimately to think least of self, and to devote his powers most resolutely to his fellow men. This disentanglement of the individual man with his personal interests and needs, was distinctly in the Divine order of the progress of Society. But at first it took a low and selfish form. Neither Stoic nor Epicurean could carry the development up to its ultimate stage, in which the higher self becomes the servant and minister of man, in which the happiness of the personal being is found in ministering to the happiness of others. For that another and a better Gospel was needed, and that too was sent. It is Christianity alone, which, while applying the strongest possible impulse to man's individual development, and pressing on him most solemnly the interests of his own being, binds him in bonds of closest brotherhood to his fellow men. Nevertheless, though under conditions they understood not, Stoic and even Epicurean were preparing the way for the Gospel.

It has been remarked that Plato and Aristotle were themselves soon well nigh forgotten in that Greece of which they were the intellectual glory; and yet it is wonderful to note, how the Sects lived upon the crumbs of the table

of the Socratic School. Socrates was the starting point of all the younger philosophies.

The first in order of the Sects was that of the Cynics, whose founder Antisthenes appeared soon after the death of Socrates, and of whom Diogenes in his tub is the farfamed representative. We can hardly call Cynicism a philosophy, it was rather a habit of life, and it was founded on the well-known contempt of Socrates for external things, his indifference to ease or pain, want or fulness, life or death. But in Socrates this noble contempt of externals was but the accident of his intense pursuit of higher things. The Cynics took the accident, as the Quakers took what was accidental in George Fox's life, and made it the basis of their discipline. In their hands it became a hard ascetic doctrine, which continued to attract its votaries for 500 years, and handed down some legacies to the ascetic school in the Christian Church.

It

The next in order of development were the Sceptics, founded by the celebrated Pyrrho of Elis, who has been the eponymus of the Sceptic schools through all time. is probable that a misinterpretation of the Socratic method was at the root of Pyrrhonism in its first inception. The form of the Socratic dialogue suggested how much was to be said on both sides of a question, and how hard it was to come at the truth. To every statement there is an answer; to every reason a counter reason; while Socrates constantly professed that he knew nothing, and bent the whole strength of his keen intellect to prove to all who conversed with him that they were in the same Pyrrhonism could not see that it was just the intensity of his conviction that truth might be known, which made him so ruthless in destroying refuges of lies and refuges of half-truths in himself and others. Pyrrhonism did see that Socrates found very much to be said both for

case.