The Conflict of Religions in the Early Roman Empire

The Stoics in some measure felt their weakness here. When they tell us to follow God, to obey God, to look to God, to live as God's sons, and leave us not altogether clear what they mean by God, their teaching is not very helpful, for it is hard to follow or look to a vaguely grasped conception. They realized that some more definite example was needed. "We ought to choose some good man," writes Seneca, "and always have him before our eyes that we may live as if he watched us, and do everything as if he saw."[²⁵⁵] The idea came from Epicurus. "Do everything, said he, as if Epicurus saw. It is without doubt a good thing to have set a guard over oneself, to whom you may look, whom you may feel present in your thoughts."[²⁵⁶] "Wherever I am, I am consorting with the best men. To them, in whatever spot, in whatever age they were, I send my mind."[²⁵⁷] He recommends Cato, Lælius, Socrates, Zeno. Epictetus has the same advice. What would Socrates do? is the canon he recommends.[²⁵⁸] "Though you are not yet a Socrates, you ought to live as one who wishes to be a Socrates."[²⁵⁹] "Go away to Socrates and see him … think what a victory he felt he won over himself."[²⁶⁰] Comte in a later day gave somewhat similar advice. It seems to show that we cannot do well without some sort of personality in which to rest ourselves.

Plutarch's criticism

When once this central uncertainty in Stoicism appeared, all the fine and true words the Stoics spoke of Providence lost their meaning for ordinary men who thought quickly. The religious teachers of the day laid hold of the old paradoxes of the school and with them demolished the Stoic Providence. "Chrysippus," says Plutarch, "neither professes himself, nor any one of his acquaintances and teachers, to be good (spoudaîon). What then do they think of others, but precisely what they say – that all men are insane, fools, unholy, impious, transgressors, that they reach the very acme of misery and of all wretchedness? And then they say that it is by Providence that our concerns are ordered – and we so wretched! If the Gods were to change their minds and wish to hurt us, to do us evil, to overthrow and utterly crush us, they could not put us in a worse condition; for Chrysippus demonstrates that life can admit no greater degree either of misery or unhappiness."[²⁶¹] Of course, this attack is unfair, but it shows how men felt. They demanded to know how they stood with the gods – were the gods many or one? were they persons or natural laws[²⁶²] or even natural objects? did they care for mankind? for the individual man? This demand was edged by exactly the same experience of life which made Stoicism so needful and so welcome to its followers. The pressure of the empire and the terrors of living drove some to philosophy and many more to the gods – and for these certainty was imperative and the Stoics could not give it.

It is easy, but not so profitable as it seems, to find faults in the religion of other men. Their generation rejected the Stoics, but they may not have been right. If the Stoics were too hasty in making reason into a despot to rule over the emotions, their contemporaries were no less hasty in deciding, on the evidence of emotions and desires, that there were gods, and these the gods of their fathers, because they wished for inward peace and could find it nowhere else. The Stoics were at least more honest with themselves, and though their school passed away, their memory remained and kept the respect of men who differed from them, but realized that they had stood for truth.

CHAPTER III
PLUTARCH

Stoicism as a system did not capture the ancient world, and even upon individuals it did not retain an undivided hold. To pronounce with its admirers to-day that it failed because the world was not worthy of it, would be a judgment, neither quite false nor altogether true, but at best not very illuminative. Men are said to be slow in taking in new thoughts, and yet it is equally true that somewhere in nearly every man there is something that responds to ideas, and even to theories; but if these on longer acquaintance fail to harmonize with the deeper instincts within him, they alarm and annoy, and the response comes in the form of re-action.

In modern times, we have seen the mind of a great people surrendered for a while to theorists and idealists. The thinking part of the French nation was carried away by the inspiration of Rousseau into all sorts of experiments at putting into hasty operation the principles and ideas they had more or less learnt from the master. Even theories extemporized on the moment, it was hoped, might be made the foundations of a new and ideal social fabric. The absurdities of the old religion yielded place to Reason – embodied symbolically for the hour in the person of Mme Momoro – afterwards, more vaguely, in Robespierre's Supreme Being, who really came from Rousseau. And then – "avec ton Être Suprème tu commences à m'embêter," said Billaud to Robespierre himself. Within a generation Chateaubriand, de Maistre, Bonald, and de la Mennais were busy refounding the Christian faith. "The rites of Christianity," wrote Chateaubriand, "are in the highest degree moral, if for no other reason than that they have been practised by our fathers, that our mothers have watched over our cradles as Christian women, that the Christian religion has chanted its psalms over our parents' coffins and invoked peace upon them in their graves."

Alongside of this let us set a sentence or two of Plutarch. "Our father then, addressing Pemptides by name, said, 'You seem to me, Pemptides, to be handling a very big matter and a risky one – or rather, you are discussing what should not be discussed at all (tà akínêta kineîn), when you question the opinion we hold about the gods, and ask reason and demonstration for everything. For the ancient and ancestral faith is enough (arkeî gàr hê pátrios kaì palaià pistis), and no clearer proof could be found than itself —

Not though man's wisdom scale the heights of thought —

but it is a common home and an established foundation for all piety; and if in one point its stable and traditional character (tò bébainon autês kaì nenomismenon) be shaken and disturbed, it will be undermined and no one will trust it… If you demand proof about each of the ancient gods, laying hands on everything sacred and bringing your sophistry to play on every altar, you will leave nothing free from quibble and cross-examination (oudèn asykophánteton oud abasániston)… Others will say that Aphrodite is desire and Hermes reason, the Muses crafts and Athene thought. Do you see, then, the abyss of atheism that lies at our feet, if we resolve each of the gods into a passion or a force or a virtue?'"[²⁶³]

Such an utterance is unmistakeable – it means a conservative re-action, and in another place we find its justification in religious emotion. "Nothing gives us more joy than what we see and do ourselves in divine service, when we carry the emblems, or join in the sacred dance, or stand by at the sacrifice or initiation… It is when the soul most believes and perceives that the god is present, that she most puts from her pain and fear and anxiety, and gives herself up to joy, yes, even as far as intoxication and laughter and merriment… In sacred processions and sacrifices not only the old man and the old woman, nor the poor and lowly,

The thick-legged drudge that sways her at the mill,

but and household slaves and hirelings are uplifted by joy and triumph. Rich men and kings have always their own banquets and feasts – but the feasts in the temples and at initiations, when men seem to touch the divine most nearly in their thought, with honour and worship, have a pleasure and a charm far more exceeding. And in this no man shares who has renounced belief in Providence. For it is not abundance of wine, nor the roasting of meat, that gives the joy in the festivals, but also a good hope, and a belief that the god is present and gracious, and accepts what is being done with a friendly mind."[²⁶⁴]

Continuity of religion

One of Chateaubriand's critics says that his plea could be advanced on behalf of any religion; and Plutarch had already made it on behalf of his own. He looks past the Stoics, and he finds in memory and association arguments that outweigh anything they can say. The Spermaticos Logos was a mere Être Suprème – a sublime conception perhaps, but it had no appeal to emotion, it waked no memories, it touched no chord of personal association. We live so largely by instinct, memory and association, that anything that threatens them seems to strike at our life,

 
So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old,
            Or let me die!
The Child is father of the Man;
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.
 

Some such thought is native to every heart, and the man who does not cling to his own past seems wanting in something essentially human. The gods were part of the past of the ancient world, and if Reason took them away, what was left? There was so much, too, that Reason could not grasp; so much to be learnt in ritual and in mystery that to the merely thinking mind had no meaning, – that must be received. Reason was invoked so lightly, and applied so carelessly and harshly, that it could take no account of the tender things of the heart. Reason destroyed but did not create, questioned without answering, and left life without sanction or communion. It was too often a mere affair of cleverness. It had its use and place, no doubt, in correcting extravagances of belief, but it was by no means the sole authority in man's life, and its function was essentially to be the handmaid of religion. "We must take Reason from philosophy to be our mystagogue and then in holy reverence consider each several word and act of worship."[²⁶⁵]

Plutarch is our representative man in this revival of religion, and some survey of his life and environment will enable us to enter more fully into his thought, and through him to understand better the beginnings of a great religious movement, of which students too often have lost sight.

For centuries the great men of Greek letters were natives of every region of the eastern Mediterranean except Greece, and Plutarch stands alone in later literature a Hellen of the motherland – Greek by blood, birth, home and instinct, proud of his race and his land, of their history, their art and their literature. When we speak of the influence of the past, it is well to remember to how great a past this man looked back, and from what a present. Long years of faction and war, as he himself says, had depopulated Greece, and the whole land could hardly furnish now the three thousand hoplites that four centuries before Megara alone had sent to Platæa. In regions where oracles of note had been, they were no more; their existence would but have emphasized the solitude – what good would an oracle be at Tegyra, or about Ptoum, where in a day's journey you might perhaps come on a solitary shepherd?[²⁶⁶] It was not only that wars and faction fights had wasted the life of the Greek people, but with the opening of the far East by Alexander, and the development of the West under Roman rule, Commerce had shifted its centres, and the Greeks had left their old homes for new regions. Still keen on money, philosophy and art, they thronged Alexandria, Antioch and Rome, and a thousand other cities. The Petrie papyri have revealed a new feature of this emigration, for the wills of the settlers often mention the names of their wives, and these were Greek women and not Egyptian, as the names of their fathers and homes prove.[²⁶⁷] Julius Cæsar had restored Corinth a century after Mummius destroyed it, and Athens was still as she had been and was to be for centuries, the resort of every one who loved philosophy and literature.[²⁶⁸] These were the two cities of Greece; the rest were reminders of what had been. In one of these forsaken places Plutarch was born, and there he was content to live and die, a citizen and a magistrate of Chæronea in Boeotia.

His family circle

His family was an old one, long associated with Chæronea. From childhood his life was rooted in the past by the most natural and delightful of all connexions. His great-grandfather, Nicarchus, used to tell how his fellow-citizens were commandeered to carry wheat on their own backs down to Anticyra for Antony's fleet – and were quickened up with the whip as they went; and "then when they had taken one consignment so, and the second was already done up into loads and ready, the news came that Antony was defeated, and that saved the city; for at once Antony's agents and soldiers fled, and they divided the grain among themselves."[²⁶⁹] The grandfather, Lamprias, lived long and saw the grandson a grown man. He appears often in Plutarch's Table Talk– a bright old man and a lively talker – like incense, he said, he was best when warmed up.[²⁷⁰] He thought poorly of the Jews for not eating pork – a most righteous dish, he said.[²⁷¹] He had tales of his own about Antony, picked up long ago from one Philotas, who had been a medical student in Alexandria and a friend of one of the royal cooks, and eventually medical attendant to a son of Antony's by Fulvia.[²⁷²] Plutarch's father was a quiet, sensible man, who maintained the practice of sacrificing,[²⁷³] kept good horses,[²⁷⁴] knew his Homer, and had something of his son's curious interest in odd problems. It is perhaps an accident that Plutarch never mentions his name, but, though he often speaks of him, it is always of "my father" or "our father" – the lifelong and instinctive habit. There were also two brothers. The witty and amiable Lamprias loved laughter and was an expert in dancing – a useful man to put things right when the dance went with more spirit than music.[²⁷⁵] Of Timon we hear less, but Plutarch sets Timon's goodness of heart among the very best gifts Fortune has sent him.[²⁷⁶] He emphasizes the bond that brothers have in the family sacrifices, ancestral rites, the common home and the common grave.[²⁷⁷] That Plutarch always had friends, men of kindly nature and intelligence, and some of them eminent, is not surprising. Other human relationships, to be mentioned hereafter, completed his circle. He was born, and grew up, and lived, in a network of love and sympathy, the record of which is in all his books.

Plutarch was born about the year 50 A.D., and, when Nero went on tour through Greece in 66 A.D., he was a student at Athens under Ammonius.[²⁷⁸] He recalls that among his fellow-students was a descendant of Themistocles, who bore his ancestor's name and still enjoyed the honours granted to him and his posterity at Magnesia.[²⁷⁹] Ammonius, whom he honoured and quoted throughout life, was a Platonist[²⁸⁰] much interested in Mathematics.[²⁸¹] He was a serious and kindly teacher with a wide range of interests, not all speculative. Plutarch records a discussion of dancing by "the good Ammonius."[²⁸²] He was thrice "General" at Athens,[²⁸³] and had at any rate once the experience of an excited mob shouting for him in the street, while he supped with his friends indoors.

Plutarch had many interests in Athens, in its literature, its philosophy and its ancient history – in its relics, too, for he speaks of memorials of Phocion and Demosthenes still extant. But he lingers especially over the wonders of Pericles and Phidias, "still fresh and new and untouched by time, as if a spirit of eternal youth, a soul that was ageless, were in the work of the artist."[²⁸⁴] Athens was a conservative place, on the whole, and a great resort for strangers. The Athenian love of talk is noticed by Luke with a touch of satire, and Dio Chrysostom admitted that the Athenians fell short of the glory of their city and their ancestors.[²⁸⁵] Yet men loved Athens.[²⁸⁶] Aulus Gellius in memory of his years there, called his book of collections Attic Nights, and here and there he speaks of student life – "It was from Ægina to Piræus that some of us who were fellow-students, Greeks and Romans, were crossing in the same ship. It was night. The sea was calm. It was summertime and the sky was clear and still. So we were sitting on the poop, all of us together, with our eyes upon the shining stars," and fell to talking about their names.[²⁸⁷]

His travels

When his student days were over, Plutarch saw something of the world. He alludes to a visit to Alexandria,[²⁸⁸] but, though he was interested in Egyptian religion, as we shall see, he does not speak of travels in the country. He must have known European Greece well, but he had little knowledge, it seems, of Asia Minor and little interest in it. He went once on official business for his city to the pro-consul of Illyricum – and had a useful lesson from his father who told him to say "We" in his report, though his appointed colleague had failed to go with him.[²⁸⁹] He twice went to Italy in the reigns of Vespasian and Domitian, and he seems to have stayed for some time in Rome, making friends in high places and giving lectures. Of the great Latin writers of his day he mentions none, nor is he mentioned by them. But he tells with pride how once Arulenus Rusticus had a letter from Domitian brought him by a soldier in the middle of one of these lectures and kept it unopened till the end.[²⁹⁰] The lectures were given in Greek. He confesses to his friend Sossius Senecio that, owing to the pressure of political business and the number of people who came about him for philosophy, when he was in Rome, it was late indeed in life that he attempted to learn Latin; and when he read Latin, it was the general sense of a passage that helped him to the meaning of the words. The niceties of the language he could not attempt, he says, though it would have been a graceful and pleasant thing for one of more leisure and fewer years.[²⁹¹] That this confession is a true one is shown by the scanty use he makes of Roman books in his biographies, by his want of acquaintance with Latin literature, poetry and philosophy, and by blunders in detail noted by his critics. Sine patris is a poor attempt at Latin grammar for a man of his learning, and in his life of Lucullus he has turned the streets of Rome into villages through inattention to the various meanings of vicus.[²⁹²]

But, as he says, he was a citizen of a small town, and he did not wish to make it smaller,[²⁹³] and he went back to Chæronea and obscurity. A city he held to be an organism like a living being,[²⁹⁴] and he never cared for a man on whom the claims of his city sat loosely – as they did on the Stoics.[²⁹⁵] The world was full of Greek philosophers and rhetoricians, lecturing and declaiming, to their great profit and glory, but Plutarch was content to stay at home, to be magistrate and priest. If men laughed to see him inspecting the measurement of tiles and the carrying of cement and stones – "it is not for myself, I say, that I am doing this but for my native-place."[²⁹⁶] This was when he was Telearch – an office once held by Epameinondas, as he liked to remember. Pliny's letters show that this official inspection of municipal building operations by honest and capable men was terribly needed. But Plutarch rose to higher dignities, and as Archon Eponymos he had to preside over feasts and sacrifices.[²⁹⁷] He was also a Boeotarch. The Roman Empire did not leave much political activity even to the free cities, but Plutarch loyally accepted the new era as from God, and found in it many blessings of peace and quiet, and some opportunities still of serving his city. He held a priesthood at Delphi, with some charge over the oracle and a stewardship at the Pythian games. He loved Delphi, and its shrine and antiquities,[²⁹⁸] and made the temple the scene of some of his best dialogues. "The kind Apollo (ho phílos)," he says, "seems to heal the questions of life, and to resolve them, by the rules he gives to those who ask; but the questions of thought he himself suggests to the philosophic temperament, waking in the soul an appetite that will lead it to truth."[²⁹⁹]

He does not seem to have gained much public renown, but he did not seek it. The fame in his day was for the men of rhetoric, and he was a man of letters. If he gave his time to municipal duties, he must have spent the greater part of his days in reading and writing. He says that a biographer needs a great many books and that as a rule many of them will not be readily accessible – to have the abundance he requires, he ought really to be in some "famous city where learning is loved and men are many"; though, he is careful to say, a man may be happy and upright in a town that is "inglorious and humble."[³⁰⁰] He must have read very widely, and he probably made good use of his stay in Rome. In philosophy and literature it is quite probable that he used hand-books of extracts, though this must not imply that he did not go to the original works of the greater writers. But his main interest lay in memoirs and travels. He had an instinct for all that was characteristic, or curious, or out-of-the-way; and all sorts of casual references show how such things attached themselves to his memory. Discursive in his reading, as most men of letters seem to be, with a quick eye for the animated scene, the striking figure, the strange occurrence, he read, one feels, for enjoyment – he would add, no doubt, for his own moral profit; indeed he says that he began his Biographies for the advantage of others and found them to be much to his own.[³⁰¹] He was of course an inveterate moralist; but unlike others of the class, he never forgets the things that have given him pleasure. They crowd his pages in genial reminiscence and apt allusion. There is always the quiet and leisurely air of one who has seen and has enjoyed, and sees and enjoys again as he writes. It is this that has made his Biographies live. They may at times exasperate the modern historian, for he is not very systematic – delightful writers rarely are. He rambles as he likes and avowedly passes the great things by and treasures the little and characteristic. "I am not writing histories but lives," he says, "and it is not necessarily in the famous action that a man's excellence or failure is revealed. But some little thing – a word or a jest – may often show character better than a battle with its ten thousand slain."[³⁰²]

But, after all, it is the characteristic rather than the character that interests him. He is not among the greatest who have drawn men, for he lacks the mind and patience to go far below the surface to find the key to the whole nature. When he has shown us one side of the hero, he will present another and a very different one, and leave us to reconcile them if we can. The contradictions remain contradictions, and he wanders pleasantly on. The Lives of Pericles and Themistocles, for instance, are little more than mere collectanea from sources widely discrepant, and often quite worthless. Of the mind of Pericles he had little conception; he gathered up and pleasantly told what he had read in books. He had too little of the critical instinct and took things too easily to weigh what he quoted.

Above all, despite his "political" energy and enthusiasm, it was impossible, for a Greek of his day to have the political insight that only comes from life in a living state. How could the Telearch of Chæronea under the Roman Empire understand Pericles? Archbishop Trench contrasts his enthusiasm about the gift of liberty to Greece by Flamininus with the reflection of Wordsworth that it is a thing

 
                which is not to be given
By all the blended powers of Earth and Heaven.
 

Plutarch really did not know what liberty is; Wordsworth on the other hand had taken part in the French Revolution, and watched with keen and sympathetic eyes the march of events throughout a most living epoch. It is worth noting that indirectly Plutarch contributed to the disasters of that epoch, for his Lycurgus had enormous influence with Rousseau and his followers who took it for history. Here was a man who made laws and constitutions in his own head and imposed them upon his fellow-countrymen. So Plutarch wrote and believed, and so read and believed thinking Frenchmen of the eighteenth century, like himself subjects of a despotism and without political experience.

Besides Biographies he wrote moral treatises – some based on lectures, others on conversation, others again little better than note-books – pleasant and readable books, if the reader will forgive a certain want of humour, and a tendency to ramble, and will surrender his mind to the long and leisurely sentences, for Plutarch is not to be hurried. Everything he wrote had some moral or religious aim. He was a believer, in days of doubt and perplexity. The Epicurean was heard at Delphi. Even in the second century, when the great, religious revival was in full swing, Lucian wrote and found readers. Men brought their difficulties to Plutarch and he went to meet them – ever glad to do something for the ancestral faith. Nor was he less ready to discuss – or record discussions of – questions much less serious. Was the hen or the egg first? Does a varied diet or a single dish help the digestion more? Why is fresh water better than salt for washing clothes? Which of Aphrodite's hands did Diomed wound?

It is always the same man, genial, garrulous, moral and sensible. There are no theatricalities in his style – he is not a rhetorician even on paper.[³⁰³] He discards the tricks of the school, adoxography, epigram and, as a rule, paradox. His simplicity is his charm. He is really interested in his subject whatever it is; and he believes in its power of interesting other men, too much to think it worth while to trick it out with extraneous prettinesses. Yet after he has discussed his theme, with excursions into its literary antecedents and its moral suggestions, we are not perhaps much nearer an explanation of the fact in question,[³⁰⁴] nor always quite sure that it is a fact. Everything interests him, but he is in no hurry to get at the bottom of anything; just as in the Lives he is occupied with everything except the depths of his hero's personality. It remains that in his various works he has given us an unexampled pageant of antiquity over a wide reach of time and many lands, and always bright with the colour of life – the work of a lover of men. "I can hardly do without Plutarch," wrote Montaigne; "he is so universal and so full, that upon all occasions, and what extravagant subject soever you take in hand, he will still intrude himself into your business, and holds out to you a liberal and not to be exhausted hand of riches and embellishments." What Shakespeare thought of him is written in three great plays.[³⁰⁵]

His wife and children

But so far nothing has been said of Plutarch's own home. The lot of the wife of a great preacher or moralist is not commonly envied; and the tracts which Plutarch wrote upon historic women and their virtues, and on the duties of married life, on diet and on the education of the young, suggest that Timoxena must have lived in an atmosphere of high moral elevation, with a wise saw and an ancient instance for every occurrence of the day. But it is clear that he loved her, and his affection for their four little boys must have been as plain to her as to his readers – and his joy when, after long waiting, at last a little girl was born. "You had longed for a daughter after four sons," he writes to her, "and I was glad when she came and I could give her your name." The little Timoxena lived for two years, and the letter of consolation which Plutarch wrote her mother tells the story of her short life. "She had by nature wonderful good temper and gentleness. So responsive to affection, so generous was she that it was a pleasure to see her tenderness. For she used to bid her nurse give the breast to other children and not to them only, but even to toys and other things in which she took delight. She was so loving that she wished everything that gave her pleasure to share in the best of what she had. I do not see, my dear wife, why things such as these, which gave us so much happiness while she lived, should give us pain and trouble now when we think of them."[³⁰⁶] He reminds her of the mysteries of Dionysus of which they were both initiates. In language that recalls Wordsworth's great Ode on the Intimations of Immortality, he suggests that old age dulls our impressions of the soul's former life, and that their little one is gone from them, before she had time to fall in love with life on earth. "And the truth about this is to be seen in the ancient use and wont of our fathers," who did not observe the ordinary sad rites of burial for little children, "as if they felt it not right in the case of those who have passed to a better and diviner lot and place… And since to disbelieve them is harder than to believe, let us comply with the laws in outward things, and let what is within be yet more stainless, pure and holy."[³⁰⁷]

Two of the sons had previously died – the eldest Soclaros, and the fourth, "our beautiful Chæron" – the name is that of the traditional founder of Chæronea. The other two, Autobulus and Plutarch grew up. Some of these names appear in the Table Talk, while others of his works were written at the suggestion of his sons.

His slaves

From the family we pass to the slaves, and here, as we should expect, Plutarch is an advocate of gentleness. In the tract On Restraining Anger a high and humane character is drawn in Fundanus, who had successfully mastered a naturally passionate temper. It has been thought that Plutarch was drawing his own portrait over his friend's name. A naïve tendency to idealise his own virtues he certainly shares with other moralists. Fundanus urges that, while all the passions need care and practice if they are to be overcome, anger is the failure to which we are most liable in the case of our slaves. Our authority over them sets us in a slippery place; temper here has nothing to check it, for here we are irresponsible and that is a position of danger. A man's wife and his friends are too apt to call gentleness to the slaves mere easy-going slackness (atonían kaì rhathumían). "I used to be provoked by such criticism myself against my slaves. I was told they were going to pieces for want of correction. Later on I realized that, first of all, it is better to let them grow worse through my forbearance than by bitterness and anger to pervert oneself for the reformation of others. And, further, I saw that many of them, through not being punished, began to be ashamed of being bad, and that forgiveness was more apt than punishment to be the beginning of a change in them – and indeed that they would serve some men more readily for a silent nod than they would others for blows and brandings. So I persuaded myself that reasoning does better than temper."[³⁰⁸] It will be remarked that Fundanus, or his recording friend, does not here take the Stoic position that the slave is as much a son of God as the master,[³⁰⁹] nor does he spare the slave for the slave's sake but to overcome his own temper. So much for theory; but men's conduct does not always square with their theories, and in life we see men guilty of kind-heartedness and large-mindedness not at all to be reconciled with the theories which they profess, when they remember them.