The framework or theory of benevolence
might be there, but the animating spirit was absent. Men who taught that
the husband or the father should look with perfect indifference on the
death of his wife or his child, and that the philosopher, though he may
shed tears of pretended sympathy in order to console his suffering
friend, must suffer no real emotion to penetrate his breast, could never
found a true or lasting religion of benevolence. Men who refused to
recognise pain and sickness as evils were scarcely likely to be very
eager to relieve them in others.
In truth, the Stoics, who taught that all virtue was conformity to
nature, were, in this respect, eminently false to their own principle.
Human nature, as revealed to us by reason, is a composite thing, a
constitution of many parts differing in kind and dignity, a hierarchy in
which many powers are intended to co-exist, but in different positions
of ascendency or subordination. To make the higher part of our nature
our whole nature is not to restore but to mutilate humanity, and this
mutilation has never been attempted without producing grave evils.
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