In the speech was irony, with which Athens was familiar. But it also displayed a conception, wholly new, that of maintaining at any cost the truth. The novelty must have charmed. When Peter and the apostles were arraigned before the Sanhedrin, their defence consisted in the very words that Socrates had used: "We should obey God rather than man."[38] [Footnote 38: Acts v. 29.] Socrates wrote nothing. The Buddha did not either. Neither did the Christ. These had their evangelists. Socrates had also disciples who, as vehicle for his ideas, employed the nightingale tongue of beauty into which the Law and the Prophets were translated by the Septuagint and into which the Gospels were put. It would be irreverent to suggest that the latter are in any way indebted to Socratic inspiration. It would be irrelevant as well. For, while the Intelligence that Socrates preached differed as much from the volage and voluptuous Zeus as the God of Christendom differs from the Jahveh of Job, yet, in a divergence so wide, an idealist, very poor except in ideas; a teacher killed by those who knew not what they did; a philosopher that drained the cup without even asking that it pass from him; a mere reformer, though dangerous perhaps as every reformer worth the name must be; but, otherwise, a mere man like any other, only a little better, could obviously have had no share. For reasons not minor but major, Plato could have had none either. It is related that a Roman invader sank back, stricken with _deisidaimonia_--the awe that the gods inspired--at the sight of the Pheidian Zeus. It is with a wonder not cognate certainly, yet in a measure relative, that one considers what Socrates must have been if millennia have gone without producing one mind approaching that of his spiritual heir. It was uranian; but not disassociated from human things. Plato, like his master, was but a man in whom the ideal was intuitive, perhaps the infernal also. In the gardens of the Academe and along the banks of the Ilissus, he announced a Last Judgment. The announcement, contained in the _Phaedo_, had for supplement a picture that may have been Persian, of the righteous ascending to heaven and the wicked descending to hell. In the _Laws_, the picture was annotated with a statement to the effect that whatever a man may do, there is an eye that sees him, a memory that registers and retains. In the _Republic_ he declared that afflictions are blessings in disguise. But his "Republic," a utopian commonwealth, was not, he said, of this world, adding in the _Phaedo_, that few are chosen though many are called. The mystery of the catholicism of the Incas, reported back to the Holy Office, was there defined as an artifice of the devil. With finer circumspection, Christian Fathers attributed the denser mystery of Greek philosophy to the inspiration of God.