there is none equal to Bunyan’s Mr. Facing-both-ways—­the fellow with one eye on heaven and one on earth—­who sincerely preaches one thing and sincerely does another, and from the intensity of his unreality is unable either to see or feel the contradiction.  He is substantially trying to cheat both God and the devil, and is in reality only cheating himself and his neighbours.  This of all characters upon the earth appears to us to be the one of which there is no hope at all, a character becoming in these days alarmingly abundant; and the aboundance of which makes us find even in a Reineke an inexpressible relief.”  And, in point of fact, the inconsistency of Seneca’s life was a conscious inconsistency.  “To the student,” he says, “who professes his wish to rise to a loftier grade of virtue, I would answer that this is my wish also, but I dare not hope it. I am preoccupied with vices.  All I require of myself is, not to be equal to the best, but only to be better than the bad.”  No doubt Seneca meant this to be understood merely for modest depreciation; but it was far truer than he would have liked seriously to confess.  He must have often and deeply felt that he was not living in accordance with the light which was in him.

It would indeed be cheap and easy, to attribute the general inferiority and the many shortcomings of Seneca’s life and character to the fact that he was a Pagan, and to suppose that if he had known Christianity he would necessarily have attained to a loftier ideal.  But such a style of reasoning and inference, commonly as it is adopted for rhetorical purposes, might surely be refused by any intelligent child.  A more intellectual assent to the lessons of Christianity would have probably been but of little avail to inspire in Seneca a nobler life.  The fact is, that neither the gift of genius nor the knowledge of Christianity are adequate to the ennoblement of the human heart, nor does the grace of God flow through the channels of surpassing intellect or of orthodox belief.  Men there have been in all ages, Pagan no less than Christian, who with scanty mental enlightenment and spiritual knowledge have yet lived holy and noble lives:  men there have been in all ages, Christian no less than Pagan, who with consummate gifts and profound erudition have disgraced some of the noblest words which ever were uttered by some of the meanest lives which were ever lived.  In the twelfth century was there any mind that shone more brightly, was there any eloquence which flowed more mightily, than that of Peter Abelard?  Yet Abelard sank beneath the meanest of his scholastic cotemporaries in the degradation of his career as much as he towered above the highest of them in the grandeur of his genius.  In the seventeenth century was there any philosopher more profound, any moralist more elevated, than Francis Bacon?  Yet Bacon could flatter a tyrant, and betray a friend, and receive a bribe, and be one of the latest of English judges