They had
courage and genius and enthusiasm, but they had no horror of immorality as
such. The Stoics saw what was wanting, and tried to supply it; but though
they could provide a theory of action, they could not make the theory into
a reality, and it is noticeable that Stoicism as a rule of life became
important only when adopted by the Romans. The Catholic Church effected
something in its better days when it had its courts which treated sins as
crimes. Calvinism, while it was believed, produced characters nobler and
grander than any which Republican Rome produced. But the Catholic Church
turned its penances into money payments. Calvinism made demands on faith
beyond what truth would bear; and when doubt had once entered, the spell
of Calvinism was broken. The veracity of the Romans, and perhaps the happy
accident that they had no inherited religious traditions, saved them for
centuries from similar trials. They had hold of real truth unalloyed with
baser metal; and truth had made them free and kept them so. When all else
has passed away, when theologies have yielded up their real meaning, and
creeds and symbols have become transparent, and man is again in contact
with the hard facts of nature, it will be found that the "Virtues" which
the Romans made into gods contain in them the essence of true religion,
that in them lies the special characteristic which distinguishes human
beings from the rest of animated things.
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