to hear of it, and he will
be free to return to England and to the woman he loves. Moreover, and
here is the real point, he is not a believer in Christianity, so that it
is no question of denying his Savior. What ought he to do? Deliverance
is easy, and the relief and advantage would be unspeakably great. But he
does not really hesitate, and every shadow of doubt disappears when he
hears his fellow-prisoner, a half-caste, pattering eagerly the words
demanded.

I will take another example, this time from the literature of ancient
Greece. In one of the shortest but not least impressive of his
_Dialogues_, the "Crito," Plato tells us of the character of Socrates,
not as a philosopher, but as a good citizen. He has been unjustly
condemned by the Athenians as an enemy to the good of the state. Crito
comes to him in prison to persuade him to escape. He urges on him many
arguments, his duty to his children included. But Socrates refuses. He
chooses to follow, not what anyone in the crowd might do, but the
example which the ideal citizen should set. It would be a breach of his
duty to fly from the judgment duly passed in the Athens to which he
belongs, even though he thinks the decree should have been different.
For it is the decree of the established justice of his city state. He
will not "play truant." He hears the words, "Listen, Socrates, to us who
have brought you up"; and in reply he refuses to go away, in these
final sentences: "This is the voice which I seem to hear murmuring in my
ears, like the sound of the flute in the ears of the mystic; that voice,
I say, is murmuring in my ears, and prevents me from hearing any other.
And I know that anything more which you may say will be vain."

Why do men of this stamp act so, it may be when leading the battle line,
it may be at critical moments of quite other kinds? It is, I think,
because they are more than mere individuals. Individual they are, but
completely real, even as individual, only in their relation to organic
and social wholes in which they are members, such as the family, the
city, the state. There is in every truly organized community a Common
Will which is willed by those who compose that community, and who in so
willing are more than isolated men and women. It is not, indeed, as
unrelated atoms that they have lived. They have grown, from the
receptive days of childhood up to maturity, in an atmosphere of example
and general custom, and their lives have widened