Epictetus says, that we can accommodate ourselves cheerfully to the providence that rules the world, if we possess two things--the power of seeing all that happens in the proper relation to its own purpose--and a grateful disposition.

The work of Antoninus is full of studies of Nature in the devout spirit of 'passing from Nature up to Nature's God;' he is never weary of expressing his thorough contentment with the course of natural events, and his sense of the beauties and fitness of everything.

Old age has its grace, and death is the becoming termination.

This high strain of exulting contemplation reconciled him to that complete submission to whatever might befall, which was the essential feature of the 'Life according to Nature,' as he conceived it.
IV .-- The Stoical theory of Virtue is implicated in the ideas of the Good, now described.
The fountain of all virtue is manifestly the life according to nature; as being the life of subordination of self to more general interests--to family, country, mankind, the whole universe.

If a man is prepared to consider himself absolutely nothing in comparison with the universal interest, and to regard it as the sole end of life, he has embraced an ideal of virtue of the loftiest order.