When we came out from the crowded room, as Arrian was nowhere to be seen, I went at once to his lodging. To my surprise, he was busy packing, amid books and papers, and a student’s other belongings. “Thanks, many thanks,” he said, “for this timely visit. This is my last day in Nicopolis. I was just coming round to wish you good-bye. You know I had to go to Corinth. Well, when I got there, I found a letter from my father bidding me wait a few days for further news from him; and on the fourth day came a message that I was to conclude my studies at once and return to Bithynia, as his health had quite given way and his affairs required all my attention. I had intended to start to-day at the fifth hour; but I have just learned that the vessel will not sail till the eighth. So sit down. Epictetus there is not time to call upon. When I write to you I shall ask you to deliver him a letter from me. Sit down, and begin by telling me about the lecture I have just missed, while it is fresh in your memory.”

When I had finished, he said, turning over the papers he was sorting, “I remember another of his lectures in which he warned us against a licentious and effeminate life. Here it is, and these are his exact words: ‘Do not, in the name of the Gods, do not you, young man, fall back again! Nay, rather go back to your home and say, now that you have once heard this warning, It is not Epictetus that has said this. How should he? It is some God wishing well to me and speaking through him. It would never have come into the mind of Epictetus to[92] say this, for it is never his custom to make personal appeals. Come, then; let us obey the voice of God, lest we fall under God’s wrath.’ I have never forgotten these words, and I trust I never shall. I think a God speaks through Epictetus. Do you not agree with me?”

“I do indeed,” said I, “but I am not convinced that God speaks all that Epictetus says, and that there is not more to be spoken. For example, he says, ‘You have but to will and it is done.’ Is that a common experience? Is it yours? He says, ‘Take from yourself the help you need.’ Do you find in yourself all the help you need? When you fall, he says, ‘Get up,’ as though we were boys in the wrestling-ring. But what if we have been stunned? What if one’s ankle is sprained or a leg broken? Do you remember what you said to me at the end of my first lecture, ‘Will it last?’ You also said that Epictetus could make us feel just what he wished us to feel—as long as he was speaking. Well, while I was sitting on the bench in the lecture-room, I felt that getting up from vice was as easy as sitting on that bench. When I walked out, it began to seem less easy. Now that I am quite away from the enchanter, talking the matter quietly over with you, the feeling has almost vanished; and I am obliged to repeat your question about this, and about much more of our Master’s doctrine, ‘Will it last?’”

“Some of it will last,” said Arrian, “We must not expect impossibilities. I have heard him admit that it is impossible to be sinless already, but he bade us remember that it is possible to be always intent on not sinning.” “Did he mean,” asked I, “by ‘already,’ that we could not be sinless in this life, but that we might be sinless at what he calls the feast of the Gods, after death?” Arrian did not at once reply. Presently he said, “I do not think so. I believe he meant that we must not expect to be sinless as soon as we have reached the intermediate stage of what he calls ‘the half-educated man.’ We must wait till we have reached the further stage, that of complete education, where, as you said just now, a man never blames himself, because he does not find in himself any fault that he could blame.”

[93]

Here Arrian made a still longer pause. Then he continued, in his usual slow, deliberate way, but with a touch of hesitation that was not usual with him, “I have here a few duplicates of my notes. Among them are some on the subject on which your remarks bear, and about which (I gather) you would like to question me—the immortality of the soul. In my hearing, he has seldom used that precise phrase. And, when he has used the epithet ‘immortal,’ it has generally applied to life like that of Tithonus—I mean, a deathless life in this present world. To desire such a life, deathless and free from disease, he thinks unreasonable. But I remember his saying once, that he was prepared for death, ‘whether it were the death of the whole or of a certain part’—that was his expression. And I think he may possibly believe that the Logos within us is reabsorbed, after death, into some kind of quintessential or divine fire from which it sprang. But I cannot say that this satisfies me.”

Neither did it satisfy me. But I said nothing. Arrian, too, was silent, turning over some of his papers and marking passages for my perusal. But presently, rousing himself, “Did you agree with me,” he said, “about the passage you transcribed, when we last met, concerning that sect of the Jews which he called the Galil?ans?” I could see that Arrian wished to divert the conversation to “the Galil?ans,” as being a subject of a less serious character than the doctrine of the immortality of the soul. But the subject of the Galil?ans or Jews had become much more serious for me now than it had been when we last conversed together. How much more, I shrank from telling him, in the few minutes at our disposal. He was good, just, a truthful scholar, a gentleman, and a kind friend. Given a few days more—even a few hours—in one another’s company, and I should not have kept my secret from him. But how could I hope, in so brief an interval, and amid so many preoccupations, to make him understand what a vast continent of new history, religion, literature—and, above all, “feeling” as opposed to “logic”—had emerged before my mind’s eye, during my recent voyages of exploration in the scriptures and in Paul’s epistles? So I replied briefly that I agreed with his view.[94] Epictetus, I said, seemed to me to be speaking, not of the Galil?an “custom,” but of their “feeling,” as also in the case of the Jews. “And indeed,” I added, “the force of this ‘feeling’ in producing co............