The gospel of Seneca, with all its searching power, seems wanting in some of the essentials of an effective religion which can work on character. Where, it may be asked, is the force to come from which shall nerve the repentant one to essay the steep ascent to the calm of indefectible virtue? And what is the reward which can more than compensate for the great renunciation? With regard to the first question, the Stoic answer is clear. The reforming force is the divine reason, indwelling in every human soul,(1675) which, if it is able, or is permitted, to emancipate itself from bondage to the things of sense, will inevitably gravitate to the divine world, from which it sprang. The question of necessity and freedom of the will has not much interest for Seneca, as a practical moralist. He believes theoretically in the old Stoic dogmas on the subject. From one point of view, God may be regarded as the eternal Fate, the inevitable law of causation. And as the Universal Reason, He cannot act otherwise than He does, without violating His very nature. But His action is self-determined and therefore free and spontaneous.(1676) This freedom man only attains by breaking away from the cruel servitude to passion and external circumstance. As a practical moral teacher, Seneca is bound to say that we can take the higher road if we will. The first step towards freedom is to grasp firmly the fundamental law of the moral life—that the only good lies in conformity to reason, to the higher part of our being. If we yield to its bidding, we can at once cut ourselves off from the deceitful life of the senses, and the vision of the true beatitude in virtue at once opens on the inner eye. When that vision has been seen, we must then seek to form a habit of the soul which shall steadily conform to the universal law, and finally give birth to a settled purpose, issuing inevitably in virtuous act.(1677) It is this fixed and stable resolution which is the Stoic ideal, although experience showed that it was rarely attained. The great renunciation is thus the entrance on a state of true freedom, which is realised only by submitting ourselves to the law of reason, that is of God. By obedience to rational law man is raised to a level far transcending the transient and shadowy dignities of the world. His rational and divine part is reunited to the Divine Spirit which “makes for righteousness”; he places himself in the sweep and freedom of a movement which finds its image and counterpart in the majestic and ordered movements of the heavenly spheres. If we ask, how can poor humanity, so abject, so brutalised, so deadened by the downward pressure of the flesh and the world, ever release itself and rise to those empyrean heights, the answer is, through the original strength of the rational, which is the divine element in the human soul. It may be, and actually is, in the mass of men, drugged and silenced by the seductions of sense and the deceptions of the world. But if, in some moment of detachment and elation, when its captors and jailors relax their guard, it can escape their clutches, it will at once seek the region of its birth, and its true home. It is in the kindred of the human reason with the Divine, the Reason of the world, that we must seek the reconciliation of two apparently opposite points of view. At one time the Stoic doctor tells us that we must trust to our own strength in the moral struggle. And again Seneca, in almost Christian phrase, comforts his disciple with the vision of God holding out a succouring hand to struggling virtue, just as he warns the backslider of an eye “that seeth in secret.” Woe to him who despises that Witness.(1678)