Socrates had no gospel, no new truth to proclaim. He dissociated himself from the ‘rationalistic’ theories of his time, not indeed because he was particularly attached to ancient ideas in religion, but because theorizing on these subjects had no interest for him.[161] On his trial he expressly disclaimed heretical views on religion. It is clear that these were only charged against him because the real offence was no crime in Athenian or any other law. The real offence was that Socrates was a relentless critic, within reach of whose tongue no patriotic rhetorician could feel himself confident and comfortable. It was a time of rhetorical patriotism in Athens. From the bitter humiliation of the Peloponnesian War had arisen an impulse towards national regeneration, a genuine and worthy impulse in itself, but one which unfortunately took shape not in a manly facing of facts, a courageous march forward to the future, but rather in a panic-stricken retreat to old conservative formulas and bigotries, to the abandonment of which by cultivated Athenians was ascribed all the evil that had fallen on the city. Socrates, however, delighted in taking popular convictions and reducing them by a series of ingenious interrogations to their verifiable residuum of truth, if there happened to be any. They commonly emerged from the ordeal in a dilapidated condition. At a time when the whole city was high strung with patriotic fervour while inwardly very uncertain about its principles of action, the presence of a thinker like Socrates, with his pitiless arraignment of every gaudy fallacy before the bar of Reason, was a continual scandal and offence, and was easily interpreted as a public danger. Had he consented to keep silent, and affected to fall in with the general trend of public sentiment, he would, as he well knew, have been safe. But he refused all compliance and compromise, and declared with absolute truth that Athens would do better to reward him for stinging it into a perception of realities than to punish him for the wholesome pain of the process. So he went with clear-sighted deliberation to his death, and that death, so wonderfully recorded for us by the greatest prose writer of all time, has ennobled all criticism, all sceptical thought, thenceforward. None can think lightly of what Socrates thought it worth his while to die for.