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calls his brothers. Antoninus says (vilI. 55), “Generally, wickedness does no harm at all to the universe; and par- ticularly, the wickedness [of one man] does no harm to an- other. It is only harmful to him who has it in his power to be released from it as soon as he shall choose.”

The first whole can sustain no evil or harm. The second part must be explained by the Stoic principle that there is no evil in anything which is not in our power. What wrong we suffer from another is his evil, not ours. But this is an admission that there is evil in a sort, for he who does wrong does evil, and if others can endure the wrong, still there is evil in the wrong-doer.

Antoninus (x1. 18) gives many excellent prez cepts with respect to wrongs and injuries, and his precepts are practical. He teaches us to bear what we cannot avoid, and his lessons may be just as useful to him who denies the being and the government of God as to him who believes in both.

There is no direct answer in Antoninus to the objec- tions which may be made to the existence and providence of God because of the moral disorder and suffering which are in the world, except this answer which he makes in reply to the supposition that even the best men may be extinguished by death.

He says if it is so, we may be sure that if it ought to have been otherwise, the gods would have ordered it otherwise. (X11. 5.) His conviction of the wisdom which we may observe in the government of the world is too strong to be disturbed by any apparent irregularities in the order of things.

That these disorders exist is a fact, and those 342 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ANTONINUS who would conclude from them against the being and govern- ment of God conclude too hastily. We all admit that there is an order in the material world, a Nature, in the sense in which that word has been explained, a constitution (xaracxev7) what we call a system, a relation of parts to one another and a fitness of the whole for something.

So in the constitution of plants and of animals there is an order, a fitness for some end. Sometimes the order, as we conceive it, is interrupted and the end, as we conceive it, is not attained. The seed, the plant or the animal sometimes perishes before it has passed through all its changes and done all its uses.

It is according to Nature, that is, a fixed order, for some to perish early and for others to do all their uses and leave successors to take their place. So man has a corporeal and intellectual and moral constitution fit for certain uses, and on the whole man performs these uses, dies and leaves other men in his place.

So society exists, and a social state is manifestly the Natural State of man, the state for which his Nature fits him; and society amidst innumerable irregularities and disorders still subsists; and perhaps we may say that the history of the past and our present knowledge give us a reasonable hope that its disorders will diminish, and that order, its governing principle, may be more firmly established.

As order then, a fixed order, we may say, subject to devia- tions real or apparent, must be admitted to exist in the whole Nature of things, that which we call disorder or evil as it seems to us, does not in any way alter the fact of the general constitution of things having a Nature or fixed order.