for beauty is as much an eternal idea as friendship or love.  Hence he threw no contempt on art, since art is based on beauty.  He approved of athletic exercises, which strengthened and beautified the body; but he would not defile the body or weaken it, either by lusts or austerities.  Passions were not to be exterminated but controlled; and controlled by reason, the light within us,—­that which guides to true knowledge, and hence to virtue, and hence to happiness.  The law of temperance, therefore, is self-control.

Courage was another of his certitudes,—­that which animated the soldier on the battlefield with patriotic glow and lofty self-sacrifice.  Life is subordinate to patriotism.  It was of but little consequence whether a man died or not, in the discharge of duty.  To do right was the main thing, because it was right.  “Like George Fox, he would do right if the world were blotted out.”

The weak point, to my mind, in the Socratic philosophy, considered in its ethical bearings, was the confounding of virtue with knowledge, and making them identical.  Socrates could probably have explained this difficulty away, for no one more than he appreciated the tyranny of passion and appetite, which thus fettered the will; according to St. Paul, “The evil that I would not, that I do.”  Men often commit sin when the consequences of it and the nature of it press upon the mind.  The knowledge of good and evil does not always restrain a man from doing what he knows will end in grief and shame.  The restraint comes, not from knowledge, but from divine aid, which was probably what Socrates meant by his daemon,—­a warning and a constraining power.

     “Est Deus in nobis, agitante calescimus illo.”

But this is not exactly the knowledge which Socrates meant, or Solomon.  Alcibiades was taught to see the loveliness of virtue and to admire it; but he had not the divine and restraining power, which Socrates called an “inspiration,” and others would call “grace.”  Yet Socrates himself, with passions and appetites as great as Alcibiades, restrained them,—­was assisted to do so by that divine Power which he recognized, and probably adored.  How far he felt his personal responsibility to this Power I do not know.  The sense of personal responsibility to God is one of the highest manifestations of Christian life, and implies a recognition of God as a personality, as a moral governor whose eye is everywhere, and whose commands are absolute.  Many have a vague idea of Providence as pervading and ruling the universe, without a sense of personal responsibility to Him; in other words, without a “fear” of Him, such as Moses taught, and which is represented by David as “the beginning of wisdom,”—­the fear to do wrong, not only because it is wrong, but also because it is displeasing to Him who can both punish and reward.  I do not believe that Socrates had this idea of God; but I do believe that he recognized His existence and providence.  Most people in