But a great teacher like Socrates is not merely an intellectual power.  “Probe a little deeper, surgeon,” said the French soldier, “and you’ll find the emperor.”  Napoleon may have impressed himself on the soldier’s intellect; he had enthroned himself in his heart.  “Slave,” said the old Roman, Marius, to the barbarian who had been sent into the dungeon to despatch him, “slave, wouldst thou kill Cains Marius?” And the barbarian, though backed by all the power of Rome, is said to have fled in dismay.  Why did he run away?  I do not know.  I only know that I should have done the same.  One more instance.  Some thirty years ago the northern army was fleeing, a disorganized mob, toward Winchester.  Early had fallen upon them suddenly in the gray of the morning, and, while one corps still held its ground, the rest of the army was melting away in panic.  Then a little red-faced trooper came tearing down the line shouting, “Face the other way boys; face the other way.”  And those panic-stricken men turned and rolled an irresistible avalanche of heroes upon the Confederate lines.  What made them turn about?  It was something which I can neither define nor analyze—­the personal power of Sheridan.  It is the secret of every great leader of men.  Now Sheridan had imparted more than information to these men.  Is it too much to say that he put himself into them?  From such men power streams out like electricity from a huge dynamo.

Now society furnishes the medium through which such a man can act.  You have all met such men, though probably not more than one or two of them.  But one such man is a host.  They may be men of few words.  But their very presence and look calls out all that is good in you; and while you are with them evil loses its power.  Says the gay and licentious Alcibiades, in Plato’s “Banquet” concerning Socrates: 

“When I heard Pericles or any other great orator, I was entertained and delighted, and I felt that he had spoken well.  But no mortal speech has ever excited in my mind such emotions as are excited by this magician.  Whenever I hear him, I am, as it were, charmed and fettered.  My heart leaps like an inspired Corybant.  My inmost soul is stung by his words as by the bite of a serpent.  It is indignant at its own rude and ignoble character.  I often weep tears of regret and think how vain and inglorious is the life I lead.  Nor am I the only one that weeps like a child and despairs of himself.  Many others are affected in the same way.”

These men are the real kings.  Their power for good, and sometimes for evil, is inestimable.  And the great advantage of social life, as a means of conforming to environment, is the medium which it furnishes to conduct the power of such men.  Man’s last effort toward conformity to environment, the struggle for existence in its last most real form, is the life and death grapple between good and evil.  For here good and evil, righteousness and sin, come face to face in spiritual form; “we wrestle