The attack, then, affords no information about Socrates’s personal point of view as regards belief in the gods, and the defence only very little. Both Xenophon and Plato give an account of Socrates’s _daimonion_, but this point has so little relation to the charge of atheism that it is not worth examination. For the rest Plato’s defence is indirect. He makes Socrates refute his opponent, but does not let him say a word about his own point of view. Xenophon is more positive, in so far as in the first place he asserts that Socrates worshipped the gods like any other good citizen, and more especially that he advised his friends to use the Oracle; in the second place, that, though he lived in full publicity, no one ever saw him do or heard him say anything of an impious nature. All these assertions are assuredly correct, and they render it highly improbable that Socrates should have secretly abandoned the popular faith, but they tell us little that is positive about his views. Fortunately we possess other means of getting to closer grips with the question; the way must be through a consideration of Socrates’s whole conduct and his mode of thought. Here we at once come to the interesting negative fact that there is nothing in tradition to indicate that Socrates ever occupied himself with theological questions. To be sure, Xenophon has twice put into his mouth a whole theodicy expressing an elaborate teleological view of nature. But that we dare not base anything upon this is now, I think, universally acknowledged. Plato, in the dialogue _Euthyphron_, makes him subject the popular notion of piety to a devastating criticism; but this, again, will not nowadays be regarded as historical by anybody. Everything we are told about Socrates which bears the stamp of historical truth indicates that he restricted himself to ethics and left theology alone. But this very fact is not without significance. It indicates that Socrates’s aim was not to alter the religious views of his contemporaries. Since he did not do so we may reasonably believe it was because they did not inconvenience him in what was most important to him, _i.e._ ethics.