Failing Epictetus, I took out from my bookcase such works of Plato and Xenophon as might contain the last thoughts of Socrates. Both of these writers believed in the immortality of the soul. Yet I could not find either of them asserting, or suggesting, that Socrates felt any trouble or anxiety for his friends and for their faith, nor any token of a hope that his soul might help theirs after his death—or rather, to use his phrase, after he had “transferred his habitation.” When I tried to find such a hope, I could not feel sure that I was interpreting the words honestly. It seemed to me that I was importing something of the Jewish _pathos_, or feeling, into an utterance of the Greek _logos_. I still retained the conviction that Socrates, in his last moments, had his disciples at heart, and that, in enjoining that last sacrifice to Æsculapius, he wished to stimulate them to something more spiritual and more permanent than that single literal act. But I longed for something more. I thought of Christ’s “constraining love,” and how a man might be “constrained” in a natural way by the love of the dead—the love of a wife, father, mother, or child. Such a love I said, might be no less powerful, for help and comfort, than the hate of Clytemnestra following Orestes for evil. Æneas (I remembered) used the word “_image_,” speaking to the spirit of Anchises, “Thy _image_, O my father, constrained me to come hither.” But Anchises replies that he himself had been all the while following his son in his perilous wanderings, so that it was not a mere “_image_.” It was a _presence_. “Is it possible,” I asked, “that Christ, not in poetry but in fact, thought of bequeathing to His disciples such a _presence_, to follow and help them after His death?” Yes. It seemed quite possible, nay, almost certain—that Christ thought this. But who, except a Christian, would believe that the thought was more than a dream? “Scaurus,” I said, “who often jests at me as a dreamer, would now jest more than ever. Here am I, pondering poetry, when I ought to be studying history! Yet how can I study history in Paul, when Paul himself tells me that he received these words from one that had died—presumably therefore in a vision? The right course will be to wait till Flaccus sends me the gospels. These may chance to be historical biographies—not records of things seen, or words heard, in visions.” And then Scaurus’s saying recurred to me, that no two writers agree independently in recording a speech or conversation for twenty consecutive words that are exactly the same. “And this,” said I, “I hope to test before many days are over, with regard to these mysterious words of Christ.”