This is a typical illustration of what has happened in Europe for more than two thousand years.  The first recorded martyr to free speculation in philosophy was Anaxagoras in Greece.  Muleted in the sum of five talents, and expelled from Athens, he was considered fortunate in being allowed to retire to Lampsacus and end his days there.  His fate, however, was soon eclipsed by the execution of Socrates,—­an event whereby the Athenian burghers were enabled to bias the expression of free opinions from that time to this.  The first person to feel the shock was Plato.  That he was affected by it, to the extent of suppressing his views on the higher questions, we can infer with the greatest probability.

[CONSEQUENCES OF THE EXECUTION OF SOCRATES.]

Aristotle was equally cowed.  A little before his death, the chief priest of Eleusis, following the Socratic precedent, entered an indictment against him for impiety.  This indictment was supported by citations of certain heretical doctrines from his published writings; on which Grote makes the significant remark, that his paean in honour of his friend Hermeias would be more offensive to the feelings of an ordinary Athenian citizen than any philosophical dogma extracted from the cautious prose compositions of Aristotle.  That is to say, the execution of Socrates was always before his eyes; he had to pare his expressions so as not to give offence to Athenian orthodoxy.  We can never know the full bearings of such a disturbing force.  The editors of Aristotle complain of the corruptness of his text; a far worse corruptness lies behind.  In Greece, Socrates alone had the courage of his opinions.  While his views as to a future life, for example, are plain and frank, the real opinion of Aristotle on the question is an insoluble problem.  Now, considering the enormous sway of Aristotle in modern Europe,—­how desirable was it that his real sentiments had reached us unperverted by the Athenian burgher and the hemlock!

It would be too adventurous to continue the illustration in detail through the Christian ages.  It is well known that the later schoolmen strove to represent reason as against authority, but wrote under the curb of the Papal power; hence their aims can only be divined.  A modern instance or two will be still more effective.

It can at last be clearly seen what was the motive of Carlyle’s perplexing style of composition.  We now know what his opinions were, when he began to write, and that to express them then would have been fatal to his success; yet he was not a man to indulge in rank hypocrisy.  He, accordingly, adopted a studied and ambiguous phraseology, which for long imposed upon the religious public, who put their own interpretation upon his mystical utterances, and gave him the benefit of any doubts.  In the “Life of Sterling” he threw off the mask, but still was not taken at his word.  Had there been a perfect tolerance of all opinions he would have begun as he ended; and his strain of composition, while still mystical and high-flown, would never have been identified with our national orthodoxy.