during which he delivered Athenian youths of their
intelligence. Facility in the operation may have been inherited.
Socrates was the son of a midwife. His own progeny consisted in a
complete transfiguration of Athenian thought. He told of an
Intelligence, supreme, ethical, just, seeing all, hearing all,
governing all; a creator made not after the image of man but of the
soul, and visible only in the conscience. It was for that he died.
There was no such god on Olympos.

There was an additional indictment. Socrates was accused of perverting
the _jeunesse doree_. At a period when, everywhere, save only in
Israel, the abnormal was usual, Socrates was almost insultingly
chaste. The perversion of which he was accused was not of that order.
It was that of inciting lads to disobey their parents when the latter
opposed what he taught.

"I am come to set a man against his father," it is written in
_Matthew_. The mission of Socrates was the same. Because of it he
died. He was the first martyr. But his death was overwhelming in its
simplicity. Even in fairyland there has been nothing more calm. By way
of preparation he said to his judges: "Were you to offer to acquit me
on condition that I no longer profess what I believe, I would answer;
'Athenians, I honour and I love you, but a god has commanded me and
that god I will obey, rather than you.'"

In the speech was irony, with which Athens was familiar. But it also
displayed a conception, wholly new, that of maintaining at any cost
the truth. The novelty must have charmed. When Peter and the apostles
were arraigned before the Sanhedrin, their defence consisted in the
very words that Socrates had used: "We should obey God rather than
man."[38]

[Footnote 38: Acts v. 29.]

Socrates wrote nothing. The Buddha did not either. Neither did the
Christ. These had their evangelists. Socrates had also disciples who,
as vehicle for his ideas, employed the nightingale tongue of beauty
into which the Law and the Prophets were translated by the Septuagint
and into which the Gospels were put.

It would be irreverent to suggest that the latter are in any way
indebted to Socratic inspiration. It would be irrelevant as well. For,
while the Intelligence that Socrates preached differed as much from
the volage and voluptuous Zeus as the God of Christendom differs from
the Jahveh of Job, yet, in a divergence so wide, an idealist, very
poor except in ideas; a teacher killed by those who knew not