Whereon he
wrote a book called, [Greek text: apokarteroon], in which a man who had
determined to starve himself, preached the miseries of human life, and
the blessings of death, with such overpowering force, that the book
actually drove many persons to commit suicide, and escape from a world
which was not fit to dwell in. A fearful proof of how rotten the state
of society was becoming, how desperate the minds of men, during those
frightful centuries which immediately preceded the Christian era, and
how fast was approaching that dark chaos of unbelief and
unrighteousness, which Paul of Tarsus so analyses and describes in the
first chapter of his Epistle to the Romans--when the old light was lost,
the old faiths extinct, the old reverence for the laws of family and
national life, destroyed, yea even the natural instincts themselves
perverted; that chaos whose darkness Juvenal, and Petronius, and Tacitus
have proved, in their fearful pages, not to have been exaggerated by the
more compassionate though more righteous Jew.
And now observe, that this selfishness--this wholesome state of
equilibrium--this philosophic calm, which is really only a lazy pride,
was, as far as we can tell, the main object of all the schools from the
time of Alexander to the Christian era.
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