hatever may have been his precise and definite ideas of God and
immortality, it is clear that he soared beyond his contemporaries in his
conceptions of Providence and of duty. He was a reformer and a
missionary, preaching a higher morality and revealing loftier truths
than any other person that we know of in pagan antiquity; although there
lived in India, about two hundred years before his day, a sage whom they
called Buddha, whom some modern scholars think approached nearer to
Christ than did Socrates or Marcus Aurelius. Very possibly. Have we any
reason to adduce that God has ever been without his witnesses on earth,
or ever will be? Why could he not have imparted wisdom both to Buddha
and Socrates, as he did to Abraham, Moses, and Paul? I look upon
Socrates as one of the witnesses and agents of Almighty power on this
earth to proclaim exalted truth and turn people from wickedness. He
himself--not indistinctly--claimed this mission.

Think what a man he was: truly was he a "moral phenomenon." You see a
man of strong animal propensities, but with a lofty soul, appearing in a
wicked and materialistic--and possibly atheistic--age, overturning all
previous systems of philosophy, and inculcating a new and higher law of
morals. You see him spending his whole life,--and a long life,--in
disinterested teachings and labors; teaching without pay, attaching
himself to youth, working in poverty and discomfort, indifferent to
wealth and honor, and even power, inculcating incessantly the worth and
dignity of the soul, and its amazing and incalculable superiority to all
the pleasures of the body and all the rewards of a worldly life. Who
gave to him this wisdom and this almost superhuman virtue? Who gave to
him this insight into the fundamental principles of morality? Who, in
this respect, made him a greater light and a clearer expounder than the
Christian Paley? Who made him, in all spiritual discernment, a wiser man
than the gifted John Stuart Mill, who seems to have been a candid
searcher after truth? In the wisdom of Socrates you see some higher
force than intellectual hardihood or intellectual clearness. How much
this pagan did to emancipate and elevate the soul! How much he did to
present the vanities and pursuits of worldly men in their true light!
What a rebuke were his life and doctrines to the Epicureanism which was
pervading all classes of society, and preparing the way for ruin! Who
cannot see in him a forerunner of that