He took that humble patient means of saving Athens: by breaking down false opinions and instilling true ones. It was beginning quite at the bottom of things. Where we advertise a public lecture, he button-holed a passer-by; and by the great power of his soul won a following presently. To rouse up a desire for right living in the youth of Athens: if he could do that, thought he, he might save Athens for the world. I wonder what the cycles of national glory would come to, how long they might last, if only the Teachers that invade to save them could have their way. Always we see the same picture: the tremendous effort of the Gods to redeem these nations in the times of their creative greatness; to lift them on to a spiritual plane, that the greatness may not wane and become ineffective. There is the figure that stands before the world, about whose perfection or whose qualities you may wrangle if you will; he is great; he is wonderful; he stirs up love and animosity;--but behind him are the Depths, the Hierarchies, the Pantheons. Socrates' warning Voice, the Daimon that counseled him in every crisis, has always been a hard nut for critics to crack. He was an impostor, was he? Away with you for a double fool! His life meets you so squarely at every point; there was no atom in his being that knew how to fear or lie.... Well, no; but he was deluded; he mistook--. Man, there is more value in the light word of Socrates affirming, than in a whole world full of evidence denying, of such maunderers as you! See here; he was the most sensible of men; balanced; keeping his head always;--a mind no mood or circumstances could deflect from rational self-control, either towards passion or ecstasy. One explanation remains--as in the case of Joan, or of H.P. Blavatsky;--he was neither deceiving nor deceived, but what he claimed to hear, he did hear; and it was the voice of One that stood behind him, and might not appear in history at all, or in the outer world at all: a greater than he, and his Teacher; whose bodily presence might have been in Greece the while, or anywhere else. How dare we pretend, because we can do a few things with a piston or a crucible, that we know the limits of natural and spiritual law?