And what Plato and Aristotle did, so to speak, against their express purpose and effort, yet did, because the force of contemporary tendency was irresistible--that the Stoa and Epicurus did more openly and professedly. With a difference in theory, it is true, owing to the difference in the surroundings. Virtue in the older day of the free and glorious commonwealth had meant physical and intellectual achievement, acts done in the public eye, and of course for the public good--a good with which the agent was identified at least in heart and soul, if not in his explicit consciousness. In later and worse days, when the political world, with the world divine, had withdrawn from actual identity with the central heart of the individual, and stood over-against him as a strange power and little better than a nuisance, virtue came to be counted as endurance, indifference, negative independence against a cold and a perplexing world. But even still, virtue is excellence: it is to rise above the ignoble level: to assert self-liberty against accident and circumstance--to attain self-controlled, self-satisfying independence--and to become God-like in its seclusion. Yet in two directions even it had to acknowledge something beyond the individual. The Epicurean--following out a suggestion of Aristotle--recognised the help which the free society of friends gave to the full development of the single seeker after a self-satisfying and complete life. The Stoic, not altogether refusing such help, tended rather to rest his single self on a fellowship of ideal sort, on the great city of gods and men, the _civitas Dei_. Thus, in separate halves, the two schools, into which Greek ethics was divided, gave expression to the sense that a new and higher community was needed--to the sense that the visible actual community no longer realised its latent idea. The Stoic emphasised the all-embracing necessity, the absolute comprehensiveness of the moral kingdom. The Epicurean saw more clearly that, if the everlasting city came from heaven, it could only visibly arise by initiation upon the earth. Christianity--in its best work--was a conjunction of the liberty with the necessity, of the human with the divine.