f innocent has regard to the
human witness, not to his own conscience.' He quotes an 'admirable
saying of Epicurus,' 'The beginning of safety is the knowledge of sin.'
He inculcates the duty of strict self-examination, and tells us how he
performed it himself at night: 'when the light is removed, and my wife,
who is by this time aware of my practice, is now silent, I pass the
whole of my day under examination.' Then he 'opens out his conscience
to the gods.' And this conscience is to every man a sort of inward
God[6]. It is in fact the representative in each man of the universal,
immutable, and divine moral law, the {101} law of nature, in conformity
with which is the only true freedom and citizenship of the world. 'For
this' (the world of the moral order), said another contemporary of St.
Paul, also a philosopher, 'is the common home of all, and its law is no
written document (letter), but God. And if a man transgresses what the
law imposes, he will be impious; or rather he will not dare transgress,
for he could not escape. Justice has many furies, watch-dogs for
sins[7].' There is in Cicero's _Republic_ a magnificent expression of
the principle of the law of nature: 'There is a true law which is right
reason, agreeable to nature, diffused among all men, constant, eternal,
which calls us to duty by its injunctions, and by its prohibitions
deters us from wrong; which upon the good lays neither injunction nor
prohibition in vain; while for the bad, neither its injunctions nor its
prohibitions avail at all. This law admits neither of addition nor
subtraction nor abrogation. The vote of neither senate nor people can
discharge us from our obligation to it. We are not to look for some
other person to expound or interpret it; nor will there be one law for
Rome and another for Athens, nor {102} one at this date and another
later on; but one law shall embrace all races over all time, eternal
and immortal; and there shall be hereby one common master and commander
of all--God, who originated this law and proposed it and arbitrates
concerning it; and if any one obeys it not, he shall play false to
himself and shall do despite to the nature of man, and by this very
fact shall pay the greatest penalties, even if he should escape all
else that is reckoned punishment.' It is of interest to notice that
the words cited by St. Paul before the Areopagus[8], 'We are also God's
offspring,' occur in a hymn of the Stoic Cleanthes, f