The Times of Michael’s Bestowal

121:4.1The gen­tiles were, from a moral stand­point, some­what in­fe­rior to the Jews, but there was pres­ent in the hearts of the no­bler gen­tiles abun­dant soil of nat­u­ral good­ness and po­ten­tial hu­man af­fec­tion in which it was pos­si­ble for the seed of Chris­tian­ity to sprout and bring forth an abun­dant har­vest of moral char­ac­ter and spir­i­tual achieve­ment. The gen­tile world was then dom­i­nated by four great philoso­phies, all more or less de­rived from the ear­lier Pla­ton­ism of the Greeks. These schools of phi­los­o­phy were:

121:4.21. The Epi­curean. This school of thought was ded­i­cated to the pur­suit of hap­pi­ness. The bet­ter Epi­cure­ans were not given to sen­sual ex­cesses. At least this doc­trine helped to de­liver the Ro­mans from a more deadly form of fa­tal­ism; it taught that men could do some­thing to im­prove their ter­res­trial sta­tus. It did ef­fec­tu­ally com­bat ig­no­rant su­per­sti­tion.

121:4.32. The Stoic. Sto­icism was the su­pe­rior phi­los­o­phy of the bet­ter classes. The Sto­ics be­lieved that a con­trol­ling Rea­son-Fate dom­i­nated all na­ture. They taught that the soul of man was di­vine; that it was im­pris­oned in the evil body of phys­i­cal na­ture. Man’s soul achieved lib­erty by liv­ing in har­mony with na­ture, with God; thus virtue came to be its own re­ward. Sto­icism as­cended to a sub­lime moral­ity, ide­als never since tran­scended by any purely hu­man sys­tem of phi­los­o­phy. While the Sto­ics pro­fessed to be the “off­spring of God,” they failed to know him and there­fore failed to find him. Sto­icism re­mained a phi­los­o­phy; it never be­came a re­li­gion. Its fol­low­ers sought to at­tune their minds to the har­mony of the Uni­ver­sal Mind, but they failed to en­vis­age them­selves as the chil­dren of a lov­ing Fa­ther. Paul leaned heav­ily to­ward Sto­icism when he wrote, “I have learned in what­so­ever state I am, there­with to be con­tent.”

121:4.43. The Cynic. Al­though the Cyn­ics traced their phi­los­o­phy to Dio­genes of Athens, they de­rived much of their doc­trine from the rem­nants of the teach­ings of Ma­chi­venta Mel­chiz­e­dek. Cyn­i­cism had for­merly been more of a re­li­gion than a phi­los­o­phy. At least the Cyn­ics made their re­li­gio-phi­los­o­phy demo­cratic. In the fields and in the mar­ket places they con­tin­u­ally preached their doc­trine that “man could save him­self if he would.” They preached sim­plic­ity and virtue and urged men to meet death fear­lessly. These wan­der­ing Cynic preach­ers did much to pre­pare the spir­i­tu­ally hun­gry pop­u­lace for the later Chris­tian mis­sion­ar­ies. Their plan of pop­u­lar preach­ing was much af­ter the pat­tern, and in ac­cor­dance with the style, of Paul’s Epis­tles.

121:4.54. The Skep­tic. Skep­ti­cism as­serted that knowl­edge was fal­la­cious, and that con­vic­tion and as­sur­ance were im­pos­si­ble. It was a purely neg­a­tive at­ti­tude and never be­came wide­spread.

121:4.6These philoso­phies were semire­li­gious; they were of­ten in­vig­o­rat­ing, eth­i­cal, and en­nobling but were usu­ally above the com­mon peo­ple. With the pos­si­ble ex­cep­tion of Cyn­i­cism, they were philoso­phies for the strong and the wise, not re­li­gions of sal­va­tion for even the poor and the weak.