charged, as he was charged, with being "a vain babbler" and "a setter forth of strange gods," did no thought cross his mind of the strange irony of history that made him, the herald of faith, sharer in the same scorn with the philosopher who loved the truth and died for the truth he loved? Doubtless the explanation of the apostle's silence lies in this, that, ever since that high hour of divine visitation on the way to Damascus, he was conscious of such an absorbing devotion, of such a transport of joy and love, that henceforth Christ filled his whole horizon-constituted, so to say, his universe. His "only love" had sprung from his "only hate." Beside His name there was no other.

"Christ! I am Christ's! and let the name suffice you.

Ay, for me, too, He greatly hath sufficed; Lo, with no winning words I would entice you.

Paul has no honor and no friend but
Christ."

It is about the year 150 A.D. that we first find the name of Socrates in a Christian writing. Justin Martyr, in his "Apology," presented to the Roman Emperors Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius, boldly claims Socrates for the Gospel and calls him a Christian before Christ. "But that some may not," he says, "in reply to our teachings, unreasonably say that, according to us, Christ was born one hundred and fifty years ago, in the time of Cyrenius, and taught what we assert Him to have taught at a later time under Pontius Pilate, and so object that all men who lived before Him were irresponsible, let us solve the difficulty in advance. We were taught that Christ is the firstborn of God, and we have already signified that He is the Reason in which every race of men did share.

Thus those who lived with reason are Christians, even if they were counted godless, like Socrates and Heracleitus among the Greeks." And

again: "Socrates knew Christ in part, for Christ is the personal appearance of the Reason that dwells in every man." Yet Justin does not identify the work and mission of Christ with those of the Greek sage. From one point of view, indeed, Jesus is another Socrates, branding the superstitions wherewith the powers of evil had blinded humanity; both were indwelt by the inspiring Word or Reason of God. Yet Justin takes care to add that in Jesus a new and higher influence has entered into history, for in Him alone does the whole Word of God stand revealed. Did any one demand proof of this? The apologist finds it in the strange and all-conquering love He has drawn forth in human hearts-a love that for His sake gladly faced death accompanied with every horror and shame the cruelty of men could devise. "Socrates," he says, "has never given any man such faith that he would die for Socratic teaching; but for Christ, not only philosophers, but even artizans and quite uneducated people go to death." So inexplicable was this self-sacrificing loyalty to Christ in the view of even such a high-minded pagan as Marcus Aurelius, that, in despair of understanding it, he impatiently sets it down to perverse folly and a spirit of braggadocio!

The next writer to take up and elaborate the thought of Justin is the famous Clement of Alexandria, who flourished toward the close of the second and at the beginning of the third century. He was steeped in Greek literature, and employed his learning in the service of the Christian faith. He maintained that all history is one, for all truth is one. In the loftier spirits of the Greek world, in men like Socrates, philosophy had been a covenant. of God; it had justified them as the Law justified the Jew. The search of the Greeks for wisdom had been a schoolmaster to bring them unto Christ.

Hence the incarnation is not a new and strange thing, an abrupt break in the spiritual continuity of human history. Christ as the indwelling Word was in the world before He came in the flesh, and was putting men to school, as it were, training them for His fuller and grander revelation. "Philosophy," says Clement, "is a preparation, making ready the way for him who is being perfected by Christ." What a noble and inspiring conception of history! How mean and unworthy beside it appears the incredible theory of the fanatical if devoted Tertullian, for whom Greek science is the invention of devils, the mother of all heresies, the bridal gift of the fallen angels to the daughters of men! And how unjust is the judgment of the great Carthaginian that Socrates was a false and even an immoral philosopher!

The nobler thought of Justin and Clement has never been wholly lost to the Christian Church. A great succession of teachers has realized its truth and urged its apologetic value. Origen, Eusebius, and Athanasius in the early centuries; Lamartine, Priestley, Schleiermacher, Stanley, and Farrar in later times-all were profoundly convinced of the truth expressed in the exclamation of Victor Hugo:

"Dieu que cherchait Socrate et que Jésus trouva!"

And what is this but the truth of the Divine immanence, to which St. John bears witness when he says that Christ was "the true Light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world," and of which St. Paul was not ignorant when he described Hellenic worship and faith as a feeling after God, if haply they might find Him.

And yet to identify the work of Socrates with that of Christ is to misread the history and confound religion with philosophy.

In the first place, Socrates calls men to knowledge; Christ summons them to faith. The mission of the Greek protomartyr was, indeed, instinct with all spiritual nobleness and dignity. He felt himself charged with a divine commission to expose the sophistries of his age, to pierce through convention and custom to universal and eternal principles, and to lay afresh the foundations of true knowledge. "God has commanded me," he says, "to examine men in oracles and in dreams and in every way in which His will was ever declared to man." Hence he was the great "cross-examiner" of his contemporaries. He strove to teach men their ignorance as a prerequisite to genuine knowledge. Against the would-be, the Gnostics, he urged that truth was something higher and greater than they supposed; that to know it brought men into contact with the unchangeable and the divine, with something infinitely more enduring than the popular notions of self and life. To the agnostics of his age he said: "You are wrong when you say that morality is a purely relative affair, that what seems to a man to be true is true for him. There is a law of right, eternal like God Himself, and it is your duty to do right apart from all question of consequence or utility." Socrates believed that, if men only knew themselves, virtuous action would inevitably follow. “Virtue is knowledge." Hence sin resolves itself into ignorance and involuntary action. A man who knows what is right must always do it. "Know thyself"; "An unexamined life is not worth living "-such are the mottoes of his mission. He calls men to self-examination as a preparation for true self-culture, rationality of action, and the best service of society. In a word, he appeals to man's intellectual nature, and lays down the law in the realization of which goodness is achieved. But, alas! expe

rience teaches that it is not knowledge which is our main need; rather is it some all-constraining impulse in whose. strength we turn away from the worse and surrender to the better. As Mrs. Browning sings in "Aurora Leigh":

"Subsists no law of life outside of life.

nal, the social leper. "You too," He says, “can claim God as your Father. You have but to go to Him with the cry, Father, I have sinned before heaven and against Thee,' and His infinite riches are already yours-pardon, peace, reconciliation, enfranchisement from the dominion of sin, the sweet

Unless He had given the life, too, with the law."

"I am come that ye might have life" is His great word. He speaks to man. not primarily as a thinker, but as a sinning, repenting, aspiring spirit, conscious of the burdens of guilt and haunted with the memories of sin, overborne by a sense of weakness amid the material immensities of the universe, yet nourishing hopes that pierce the limiting darkness of his immediate vision and range amid the vistas of an infinite future. He puts within man the allpotent secret of moral restoration. In the strength of the love which He has inspired, the lustful have grown pure, the unworthily ambitious have become the self-denying servants of their fellows, the burdened and sorrow-stricken have held on their dolorous path in peaceful surrender to the heavy hand. of God. History thus attests that, while it was the work of Socrates to reform philosophy, it was reserved for Christ to satisfy the spiritual instincts of men and found the final and absolute religion. Socrates was concerned with intellectual disease; Jesus with the burden of sin.

In the second place, the message of Socrates is only for the free citizen of a Greek city; Christ's word is for man as man. "Socrates could demand justice between Greek and Greek; Christ could require purity of all men." For the slave and the outcast Socrates had no gospel. These were the doomed and hopeless victims of evil. But Christ addresses all men-the slave, the crimi

of Christ the worst man that ever lived, the most lost to virtue and goodness, is not without value, and, as Pascal says, "tho unworthy of God, may yet be made worthy of Him." Every soul as such is the crowned heir of immortal hopes. It is Christ who has opened the gates of immortality to universal man. He has answered the dumb and inarticulate yearnings of humanity for a Guide through the dim and perilous way that lies beyond the grave, and has revealed that "more sure word of God" for which Plato longed, and in the absence of which the teachings of philosophy were but "a raft on which one must make the hazardous voyage of life." Did Socrates believe in immortality? "On the one hand lay the Orphic belief or imagination, which had by this time. become traditional among a few; on the other, what tended to be the prevailing notion of a skeptical age, that with death there came the extinction of all conscious life. Socrates, in Plato's 'Apology,' is represented, probably with truth, as holding his judgment in suspense between these different views, and saying that to assert either would. be to seem to know what one does not know." His farewell to the judges who condemned him shows the sad uncertainty with which he met his end: "The hour of departure has arrived and we go our ways. I go to die and you to live which is better, God only knows." Not from the prison-chamber where Socrates drank the fatal cup, but from the open and empty grave of Easter morning has sprung

the indestructible assurance of inmortal life.

Finally, the worth of Christ's death for humanity is infinitely greater than that of Socrates. The philosopher's end, indeed, is one of the world's noblest memories. He died a martyr for the truth, victim to the passion and brutality of an age whose whole mental outlook he had outgrown. Are we to see, then, in the tragedy of Calvary, only a mournful repetition of the dreadful outrage wrong ever inflicts on goodness? Does Jesus merely take His place in the ranks of "the noble army of martyrs" who have suffered vicariously for us, inasmuch as through their pain and conflict blessings are ours which else were impossible? Men have often drawn a parallel between the hemlockcup and the cross, as tho both stood for spiritual values of much the same order. The somewhat rhetorical exclamation of Rousseau is a classic illustration: "If the life and death of Socrates are those of a sage, the life and death of Jesus are those of a god!" Voltaire, with keener insight, wrote, it is said, opposite these words on the margin: "You forget the agony in the Garden." All unwittingly the great skeptic pointed to a mysterious and inexplicable element in the sufferings of Christ, to something

which lifted the Passion into a category by itself, and clothed it with a unique significance. Christ's death was connected from the first with the forgiveness of sins, and was felt both by Christ and His disciples to constitute an epoch in the history of God's dealings with the race. Why is it that the cross has filled the world with wailing? Is it not because it is the symbol at once of the immitigable horror and cruelty of sin and of the unconquered and unconquerable love of God, which faces the worst that evil and death can do that all men might win their way to blessedness and life? Deep planted in the soil of the world's history the cross stands, and from its foot flow the healing streams that cleanse the wounds and sores of humanity. The death of Socrates has, indeed, challenged the reverential admiration of succeeding generations, but it is only the sacrifice of Calvary that is forever evoking a love stronger than death, and drawing forth fresh tears of a penitence that heals and sanctifies the soul, and creating the lofty enthusiasms and spiritual intensities that redeem existence from weariness and vanity and mark the turning-points in every advance of history. Jesus is more than another and a higher Socrates. He is the Lord of life and love.

Civic Responsibility.-People have said to me, "What a wonderful election! How astounding that the very large minority accepts the choice of the majority and everything moves on serenely." "Well," I said, "yes, in one way it is, but it reminds me very much of what the old Scotchman said to a very enthusiastic old woman whom he met when he was coming out of a church just after a sermon by a very great Scotch preacher, Dr. Chalmers, I think it was. She met this old man as he was walking out and she said: 'Is the sairrmon done?' 'Naa,' he said, 'It is not. It is a' said, but it a' remains to be done.' It is precisely that way in the republic in which you and I live. It

has all been said, but it still remains for you and for me and all the others as fellow-citizens of the republic to determine how things shall be done. That is the principle which underlies the whole constitution of society.”

If this were a paternal form of government, you and I might do as the groom did in the English story. The vicar said to him, "Thomas, I was glad to see you in church on Sunday." "Yes, sir," he answered, "I am glad to come to church, because I can stick up my feet and think of nothing." But you and I must recognize the fact that we can not have the privilege of belonging to a republic without the responsibilities of belonging to a republic.-Bishop Henry C. Potter.