The Christians disliked the Stoics, the Stoics despised and persecuted
the Christians. "The world knows nothing of its greatest men." Seneca
would have stood aghast at the very notion of his receiving the lessons,
still more of his adopting the religion, of a poor, accused, and
wandering Jew. The haughty, wealthy, eloquent, prosperous, powerful
philosopher would have smiled at the notion that any future ages would
suspect him of having borrowed any of his polished and epigrammatic
lessons of philosophic morals or religion from one whom, if he heard of
him, he would have regarded as a poor wretch, half fanatic and half
barbarian.
We learn from St. Paul himself that the early converts of Christianity
were men in the very depths of poverty,[46] and that its preachers were
regarded as fools, and weak, and were despised, and naked, and
buffeted--persecuted and homeless labourers--a spectacle to the world,
and to angels, and to men, "made as the filth of the earth and the
off-scouring of all things." We know that their preaching was to the
Greeks "foolishness," and that, when they spoke of Jesus and the
resurrection, their hearers mocked[47] and jeered.
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