The Stoics held both the above-mentioned intelligence and the souls of men to be portions of the essence of God,33 or parts of the soul of the world,34 and to be corporeal,35 and perishable.36 Some of them indeed maintained that human souls subsisted after death; but that they were, like all other beings, to be consumed at the conflagration. Cleanthes taught that all souls lasted till that time; Chrysippus, only those of the good.37 Seneca is perpetually wavering, sometimes speaking of the soul as immortal; and, at others, as perishing with the body. And indeed there is nothing but confusion, and a melancholy uncertainty, to be met with among the Stoics on this subject.

§ 20. There is, I think, very little evidence to be found that they believed future rewards or punishments, compared with that which appears to the contrary;38 at least the reader will observe that Epictetus never asserts either. He strongly insists that a bad man hath no other punishment than being such; and a good man no other reward;39 and he tells his disciple that, when want of necessaries obliges him to go out of life, he returns to the four elements of which he was made; that there is no Hades nor Acheron nor Pyriphlegethon;40 and he clearly affirms that personal existence is lost in death.41 Had Epictetus believed future rewards, he must, of course, have made frequent mention of them.42 M. Antoninus, upon a supposition that souls continue after death, makes them to remain for some time in the air, and then to be changed, diffused, kindled, and resumed into the productive intelligence of the universe.43 In another place he vindicates the conduct of Providence, on the hypothesis that the souls of the good are extinguished by death.44

§ 21. The Stoics thought that every single person had a tutelary genius assigned him by God, as a guardian of his soul and a superintendent of his conduct,45 and that all virtue and happiness consist in acting in concert with this genius, with reference to the will of the supreme director of the whole.46 Sometimes, however, they make the genius to be only the ruling faculty of every one's own mind.47

§ 22. A very slight examination of their writings is sufficient to convince any impartial reader how little the doctrines of this sect were fitted to influence the generality of mankind. But indeed about the generality of mankind the Stoics do not appear to have given themselves any kind of trouble. They seemed to consider all (except the few who were students in the intricacies of a philosophic system) as very little superior to beasts; and, with great tranquillity, left them to follow the devices of their own ungoverned appetites and passions. How unlike was this to the diffusive benevolence of the divine author of the Christian religion, who adapted his discourses to the comprehension, and extended the means of happiness to the attainment, of all mankind!

§ 23. There seem to be only two methods by which the present appearances of things are capable of being reconciled to our ideas of the justice, wisdom, and goodness of God: the one is the doctrine of a future state; the other, the position that virtue alone is sufficient to human happiness in this.48 The first, which was the method chosen by Socrates, solves every difficulty, without contradicting either sense or reason; the latter, which was unfortunately maintained by the Stoics, is repugnant to both.

§ 24. That there is an intrinsic beauty and excellency in moral goodness; that it is the ornament and perfection of all rational beings; and that, till conscience is stifled by repeated guilt, we feel an obligation to prefer and follow, so far as we perceive it, in all cases; and find an inward satisfaction, and generally receive outward advantages, from so doing,—are positions which no thinking person can contradict: but it doth not follow from hence, that in such a mixture as mankind it is its own sufficient reward. God alone, infinitely perfect, is happy in and from himself. The virtue of finite beings must be defective: and the happiness of created beings must be dependent. It is undeniable fact that the natural consequences of virtue in some may be interrupted by the vices of others. How much are the best persons liable to suffer from the follies of the unthinking; from the ill-nature, the rage, the scorn of the malevolent; from the cold and penurious hardheartedness of the unfeeling; from persecutions, for the sake both of religion and honesty; from ill returns to conjugal, to parental, to friendly affection; and from an innumerable train of other evils, to which the most amiable dispositions are usually the most sensible! It is no less undeniable that the natural consequences of virtue are interrupted by the struggles of our own passions (which we may overcome rewardably, though very imperfectly, or, if we live to overcome more perfectly, we may not live to enjoy the victory); by sickness, pain, languor, want; and by what we feel from the death or the sufferings of those with whom we are most nearly connected. We are often, indeed, afflicted by many of these things more than we ought to be. But concern for some, at least our own failings, for instance, is directly a duty; for others, it is visibly the instrument of moral improvement; for more still, it is the unavoidable result of our frame; and they who carry it too far may, on the whole, be good characters; and even they who do not, in any considerable degree, may however be extremely wretched. How, then, can virtue be its own reward to mankind in general, or indeed a proportionable reward to almost any man? Or how, unless the view be extended beyond such a scene of things, the certain means of happiness? The originally appointed means of happiness it undoubtedly is; but that it should be an effectual and infallible means to creatures so imperfect, passing through such a disordered world, is impossible, without a state of future reward; and of this the gospel alone gives us full assurance.

§ 25. By rejecting the doctrine of recompenses in another life, the Stoics were reduced to the extravagance of supposing felicity to be enjoyed in circumstances which are incapable of it. That a good man stretched on a rack, or reposing on a bed of roses, should enjoy himself equally, was a notion which could gain but few proselytes; and a sad experience that pain was an evil, sometimes drove their own disciples from the thorny asperities of the portico to the flowery gardens of Epicurus.

§ 26. The absolute indifference of all externals, and the position, that things independent on choice are nothing to us, the grand point on which their arguments turned, every one who feels knows to be false: and the practice of the wisest and best among them proved it in fact to be so. It is remarkable that no sect of philosophers ever so dogmatically prescribed, or so frequently committed, suicide as those very Stoics, who taught that the pains and sufferings, which they strove to end by this act of rebellion against the decrees of Providence, were no evils. How absolutely this horrid practice contradicted all their noble precepts of resignation and submission to the divine will is too evident to need any enlargement. They professed, indeed, in suicide to follow the divine will; but this was a lamentably weak pretence. Even supposing sufferings to be evils, they are no proof of a signal from God to abandon life; but to show an exemplary patience, which he will reward: but, supposing them, as the Stoics did, not to be evils, they afford not so much as the shadow of a proof.49

§ 27. As the Stoics, by the permission of suicide, plainly implied that external inconveniences were not indifferent in the extremity, it follows that they must proportionably be allowed not to be indifferent in the inferior degrees; of which Zeno seemed to be perfectly well convinced, by hanging himself when his finger ached. And where was the use of taking so much pains to say and believe what they knew to be false? It might, perhaps, be thought to be of some benefit, in the time of the later Stoics, to the great men of Rome, whom the emperors frequently butchered at their pleasure: and this is the use to which Epictetus is perpetually applying it. Yet, even in this case, the Stoic doctrine, where men could bring themselves to act upon it, made them absurdly rough, as appears by the history of Helvidius Priscus, and hindered the good they might otherwise have done. And if a man, taught thus to despise tortures and death, should happen at the same time to be wrong-headed, for which he had no small chance, he would in one respect be a more terrible wild beast than an enthusiast of any other sect, as he would not think his sufferings evils; though in another he would be less so, as he would not hope to be rewarded for them hereafter.

§ 28.