Still, we can find in Seneca all the Stoic gospel, and moral idealism. “Nil bonum nisi verum” is the fundamental principle. The failures, aberrations, and sins of men arise from a false conception of what is good, produced by the warping effect of external things upon the higher principle. The avaricious, the ambitious, the sensual, live in a vain show. They are pursuing unreal objects of desire, which cheat and befool the reason, and turn to ashes when they are won. The “kingdom of Heaven is within.” It is the freedom, the peace, the tranquil sense of power over all that is fortuitous and external and fleeting, which alone can realise the highest good of man.(1671) It is attained only by virtue, that is, by living in obedience to the law of reason, which has its voice and representative in each human soul. The summons to yield ourselves to the law of nature and reason simply calls us to obey our highest part (_τὸ ἡγεμονικόν_), which is a steadfast witness to the eternal truth of things, and, if unbribed and unperverted, will discern infallibly the right line of conduct amid all the clamorous or seductive temptations of the flesh or of the world. Nothing is a real good which has not the stamp and hall-mark of reason, which is not within the soul itself, that is within our own power. Everything worth having or wishing for is within. External things, wealth, power, high place, the pleasures of sense, are transitory, deceptive, unstable, the gifts of Fortune, and equally at her mercy. In the mad struggle for these ephemeral pleasures, the wise man retires unobserved from the scene of cruel and sordid rapacity, having secretly within him the greatest prize of all, which Fortune cannot give or take away.(1672) If these things were really good, then God would be less happy than the slave of lust and ambition, than the sensualist who is fascinated by a mistress or a minion, the trader who may be ruined by a storm, the wealthy minister who may at any moment be ordered to death by a Nero.(1673) The only real liberty and human dignity are to be found in renunciation. If we jealously guard and reverence the divine reason within us, and obey its monitions, which are in truth the voice of God, the Universal Reason, then we have an impregnable fortress which cannot be stormed by any adverse fortune. The peace and freedom so won may be called, although Seneca does not so call it, the “peace of God.” For it is in fact the restored harmony between the human spirit and the Reason of the world, and the cessation of the weary conflict between the “law in the members” and “the law of the mind,” which ends so often in that other peace of a “mare mortuum,” a stillness of moral death.(1674)