crack.  He was an impostor, was he?  Away with you for a double fool!  His life meets you so squarely at every point; there was no atom in his being that knew how to fear or lie....  Well, no; but he was deluded; he mistook—.  Man, there is more value in the light word of Socrates affirming, than in a whole world full of evidence denying, of such maunderers as you!  See here; he was the most sensible of men; balanced; keeping his head always;—­a mind no mood or circumstances could deflect from rational self-control, either towards passion or ecstasy.  One explanation remains—­as in the case of Joan, or of H.P.  Blavatsky;—­he was neither deceiving nor deceived, but what he claimed to hear, he did hear; and it was the voice of One that stood behind him, and might not appear in history at all, or in the outer world at all:  a greater than he, and his Teacher; whose bodily presence might have been in Greece the while, or anywhere else.  How dare we pretend, because we can do a few things with a piston or a crucible, that we know the limits of natural and spiritual law?

It is a strange figure to find in Greece; drawn thither, one would say, by the attraction of opposites.  He must have owed some of his power to his being such a contrast to all things familiar.  Personal beauty was extremely common, and he was comically ugly.  The Athenians were one of the best-educated populations of ancient or modern times—­far ahead of ourselves; and he was ill-educated, and acted as a public teacher.  He was hen-pecked at home, in an age when the place of woman was a very subordinate and submissive one; and he was the butt of all joke-lovers abroad, and himself enjoyed the joke most of all.  And he quietly stood alone, against the mob and his fellow-judges, for the hapless victors of Arginusae in 406; and he quietly stood alone against the Thirty Tyrants during their reign of terror in 404, disobeying them at peril of his life.  But Strip him of the “thing of sinews and muscles,” as he called his outer self; forget the queer old personality that appears in the Clouds of Aristophanes, or for that matter in the Memorabilia of Xenophon—­and what kind of picture of Socrates should we see?  The humor would not go, for it is a universal quality; it has been said no Adept was ever without it; could you draw aside the veil of Mother Isis herself, and draw it suddenly, I suspect you should surprise a laugh vanishing from her face.  So the humor would remain; and with it there would be ... something calm, aloof, unshakable, yet vitally affectioned towards Athens, the Athenians, humanity; something unsurprised at, far less hoping or fearing anything from, life or death; in possession of “the peace which passeth understanding”; native to “the eternity that baffles all faculty of computation";—­something that drew all sorts and conditions of Athenians to him, good and bad, Plato and Alcibiades, by “that diffusive love, not such as rises and falls upon waves