and incalculable superiority to all the pleasures of the body and all the rewards of a worldly life.  Who gave to him this wisdom and this almost superhuman virtue?  Who gave to him this insight into the fundamental principles of morality?  Who, in this respect, made him a greater light and a clearer expounder than the Christian Paley?  Who made him, in all spiritual discernment, a wiser man than the gifted John Stuart Mill, who seems to have been a candid searcher after truth?  In the wisdom of Socrates you see some higher force than intellectual hardihood or intellectual clearness.  How much this pagan did to emancipate and elevate the soul!  How much he did to present the vanities and pursuits of worldly men in their true light!  What a rebuke were his life and doctrines to the Epicureanism which was pervading all classes of society, and preparing the way for ruin!  Who cannot see in him a forerunner of that greater Teacher who was the friend of publicans and sinners; who rejected the leaven of the Pharisees and the speculations of the Sadducees; who scorned the riches and glories of the world; who rebuked everything pretentious and arrogant; who enjoined humility and self-abnegation; who exposed the ignorance and sophistries of ordinary teachers; and who propounded to his disciples no such “miserable interrogatory” as “Who shall show us any good?” but a higher question for their solution and that of all pleasure-seeking and money-hunting people to the end of time,—­“What shall a man give in exchange for his soul?”

It very rarely happens that a great benefactor escapes persecution, especially if he is persistent in denouncing false opinions which are popular, or prevailing follies and sins.  As the Scribes and Pharisees, who had been so severely and openly exposed in all their hypocrisies by our Lord, took the lead in causing his crucifixion, so the Sophists and tyrants of Athens headed the fanatical persecution of Socrates because he exposed their shallowness and worldliness, and stung them to the quick by his sarcasms and ridicule.  His elevated morality and lofty spiritual life do not alone account for the persecution.  If he had let persons alone, and had not ridiculed their opinions and pretensions, they would probably have let him alone.  Galileo aroused the wrath of the Inquisition not for his scientific discoveries, but because he ridiculed the Dominican and Jesuit guardians of the philosophy of the Middle Ages, and because he seemed to undermine the authority of the Scriptures and of the Church:  his boldness, his sarcasms, and his mocking spirit were more offensive than his doctrines.  The Church did not persecute Kepler or Pascal.  The Athenians may have condemned Xenophanes and Anaxagoras, yet not the other Ionian philosophers, nor the lofty speculations of Plato; but they murdered Socrates because they hated him.  It was not pleasant to the gay leaders of Athenian society to hear the utter vanity of their worldly