Once in a thousand years a man may stand in a funeral crowd after the fighting is over, and his heart may stir within him as he hears Pericles abstract from the million qualities of individual Athenians in the present and the past just those that make the meaning of Athens to the world.  But afterwards all that he will remember may be the cadence of Pericles’ voice, the movement of his hand, or the sobbing of some mother of the dead.

In the evolution of politics, among the most important events have been the successive creations of new moral entities—­of such ideals as justice, freedom, right.  In their origin that process of conscious logical abstraction, which we are tempted to accept as the explanation of all mental phenomena, must have corresponded in great part to the historical fact.  We have, for instance, contemporary accounts of the conversations in which Socrates compared and analysed the unwilling answers of jurymen and statesmen, and we know that the word Justice was made by his work an infinitely more effective political term.  It is certain too that for many centuries before Socrates the slow adaptation of the same word by common use was from time to time quickened by some forgotten wise man who brought to bear upon it the intolerable effort of conscious thought.  But as soon as, at each stage, the work was done, and Justice, like a rock statue on whom successive generations of artists have toiled, stood out in compelling beauty, she was seen not as an abstraction but as a direct revelation.  It is true that this revelation made the older symbols mean and dead, but that which overcame them seemed a real and visible thing, not a difficult process of comparison and analysis.  Antigone in the play defied in the name of Justice the command which the sceptre-bearing king had sent through the sacred person of his herald.  But Justice to her was a goddess, ’housemate of the nether gods’—­and the sons of those Athenian citizens who applauded the Antigone condemned Socrates to death because his dialectic turned the gods back into abstractions.

The great Jewish prophets owed much of their spiritual supremacy to the fact that they were able to present a moral idea with intense emotional force without stiffening it into a personification; but that was because they saw it always in relation to the most personal of all gods.  Amos wrote, ’I hate, I despise your feasts, and I will not smell the savour of your assemblies....  Take thou away from me the noise of thy songs; for I will not hear the melody of thy viols.  But let judgment roll down as waters, and righteousness as an ever-flowing stream.’[15] ‘Judgment’ and ‘righteousness’ are not goddesses, but the voice which Amos heard was not the voice of an abstraction.

[15] Amos, ch. v., vv. 21, 23, 24 (R.V.M.).