truths. He must carry his interlocutor along with him; must compel him to admit his errors; must stimulate his desire of improvement by bringing him face to face with his own ignorance. Much as we must value the moral teaching of Christ, it must be confessed that the peculiar gift of Socrates is one of a far rarer kind. The power of inculcating holiness, purity, charity, and other virtues, either directly by short maxims (as in the Confucian Analects, in Mencius, or in Marcus Aurelius), or indirectly by stories (as in Buddhagosha's parables), is by no means so uncommon as the Socratic gift of searching examination into men's minds and souls. If Jesus is unsurpassed in the former—"primus inter pares"—Socrates is absolutely without a rival in the latter.
Whether the shock of the elenchus of Socrates, or the touching beauty of the parables and the Sermon on the Mount, produced the greatest benefit to the hearers is a question that can hardly be determined. The effect of either method must depend upon the character of those to whom it is applied. Outward appearances would lead us to assign more influence to the method of Jesus; for Socrates left no Socratics, while Christ did leave Christians to hand on his doctrine. But, in the first place, it may be confidently asserted that no lasting sect could have been formed upon the basis of the few truths taught by Jesus himself; and, in the second place, the fact that he became the founder of a new religion must be attributed as much to the state of Judea at the time as to his personal influence. That the influence of Socrates was not small in his own life-time might be inferred from the bitterness of the prosecution alone, even if Plato had not remained to attest the abiding impress he left upon an intellect by the side of which those of Peter, James, and John, are but as little children to a full-grown athlete. We can imagine the havoc that would have been made in the statements and arguments of Jesus had Socrates met him face to face and subjected him to his testing method. How ill would his loose popular notions have borne a close examination of their foundations; how easily would his dogmatic assertions have been exposed in all their naked presumption by a few simple questions; how quickly would his careless reasoning have been shattered by the dialectic art which would have forced
