service, a service on which
one must needs move about, solemn, serious, depressed, with the hushed
footsteps of those who move about the house where a dead body is lying.
Such was the impression which occurred to Marius again and again as he
read, with a growing sense of some profound dissidence from his author.
By certain quite traceable links of association he was reminded, in
spite of the moral beauty of the philosophic emperor's ideas, how he
had sat, essentially unconcerned, at the public shows. For, actually,
his contemplations had made him of a sad heart, inducing in him that
melancholy--Tristitia--which even the monastic moralists have held to
be of the nature of deadly sin, akin to the sin of Desidia or
Inactivity. Resignation, a sombre resignation, a sad heart, patient
bearing of the burden of a sad heart:--Yes! this belonged doubtless to
the situation of an honest thinker upon the world. Only, in this case
there seemed to be too much of a complacent acquiescence in the world
as it is. And there could be no true Theodice in that; no real
accommodation of the world as it is, to the divine pattern of the
Logos, the eternal reason, over against it. It amounted to a tolerance
of evil.

The soul of good, though it moveth upon a way thou canst but little
understand, yet prospereth on the journey:

[52] If thou sufferest nothing contrary to nature, there can be
nought of evil with thee therein.

If thou hast done aught in harmony with that reason in which men are
communicant with the gods, there also can be nothing of evil with
thee--nothing to be afraid of:

Whatever is, is right; as from the hand of one dispensing to every
man according to his desert:

If reason fulfil its part in things, what more dost thou require?

Dost thou take it ill that thy stature is but of four cubits?

That which happeneth to each of us is for the profit of the whole.

The profit of the whole,--that was sufficient!+

--Links, in a train of thought really generous! of which, nevertheless,
the forced and yet facile optimism, refusing to see evil anywhere,
might lack, after all, the secret of genuine cheerfulness. It left in
truth a weight upon the spirits; and with that weight unlifted, there
could be no real justification of the ways of Heaven to man. "Let
thine air be cheerful," he had said; and, with an effort, did himself
at times attain to that serenity