Greece and Rome had religious instincts, and believed in supernatural forces, who exercised an influence over their destiny,—­although they called them “gods,” or divinities, and not the “God Almighty” whom Moses taught.  The existence of temples, the offices of priests, and the consultation of oracles and soothsayers, all point to this.  And the people not only believed in the existence of these supernatural powers, to whom they erected temples and statues, but many of them believed in a future state of rewards and punishments,—­otherwise the names of Minos and Rhadamanthus and other judges of the dead are unintelligible.  Paganism and mythology did not deny the existence and power of gods,—­yea, the immortal gods; they only multiplied their number, representing them as avenging deities with human passions and frailties, and offering to them gross and superstitious rites of worship.  They had imperfect and even degrading ideas of the gods, but acknowledged their existence and their power.  Socrates emancipated himself from these degrading superstitions, and had a loftier idea of God than the people, or he would not have been accused of impiety,—­that is, a dissent from the popular belief; although there is one thing which I cannot understand in his life, and cannot harmonize with his general teachings,—­that in his last hours his last act was to command the sacrifice of a cock to Aesculapius.

But whatever may have been his precise and definite ideas of God and immortality, it is clear that he soared beyond his contemporaries in his conceptions of Providence and of duty.  He was a reformer and a missionary, preaching a higher morality and revealing loftier truths than any other person that we know of in pagan antiquity; although there lived in India, about two hundred years before his day, a sage whom they called Buddha, whom some modern scholars think approached nearer to Christ than did Socrates or Marcus Aurelius.  Very possibly.  Have we any reason to adduce that God has ever been without his witnesses on earth, or ever will be?  Why could he not have imparted wisdom both to Buddha and Socrates, as he did to Abraham, Moses, and Paul?  I look upon Socrates as one of the witnesses and agents of Almighty power on this earth to proclaim exalted truth and turn people from wickedness.  He himself—­not indistinctly—­claimed this mission.

Think what a man he was:  truly was he a “moral phenomenon.”  You see a man of strong animal propensities, but with a lofty soul, appearing in a wicked and materialistic—­and possibly atheistic—­age, overturning all previous systems of philosophy, and inculcating a new and higher law of morals.  You see him spending his whole life,—­and a long life,—­in disinterested teachings and labors; teaching without pay, attaching himself to youth, working in poverty and discomfort, indifferent to wealth and honor, and even power, inculcating incessantly the worth and dignity of the soul, and its amazing