Note 86.1 — SOCRATES.

The theological convictions of Socrates being so strong and so decided, it followed as a necessary consequence, in a person of so practical a character, that he should be a pious man, and that he should practise those rites and services by which the dependent position of man towards the gods is most naturally and effectively expressed. If man, as was taught in the above extract, is the only animal capable of religion, then the worship of the Supreme Intelligence becomes the peculiar sign, privilege, and glory of his humanity. An irreligious man, a speculative or practical atheist, is as a sovereign who voluntarily takes off his crown and declares himself unworthy to reign. Religious worship, therefore, being an act which a man is specially bound to perform in virtue of his humanity, neither Socrates nor any other pious heathen thinker could have any doubt as to the peculiar forms and ceremonies that ought to constitute this act. For all the heathens,—certainly all Greeks and Romans,—held that religion was an essential function of the State, that Church and State, as we phrase it, are one and inseparable, consequently that every good subject owed allegiance to the religious traditions and observances of his countrymen, just as he did to the civil laws.[86.1] The gods were to be worshipped by every good citizen in every state,—νόμῳ πόλεως,—or, as we would say, according to the law of the land; and as the religions of Greece and Rome were not fenced with bristling dogmas in the shape of what we call a Creed and Church Articles, but floated quite freely in the region of reverential tradition, while, at the same time, in those days, no man ever dreamed of haying a religion for himself any more than of having a civil government for himself, the conformity even of great thinkers to the popular faith was not naturally accompanied by any taint of that species of insincerity which has so often attached to the subscription of modern articles of belief. The right of private judgment was exercised by the Greeks only in the domain of philosophical speculation; for teaching the results of these speculations they established schools; but the idea of protesting and dissenting and making a private business of religion, for the maintenance of certain ceremonies, forms of church-government, or favourite doctrines, could never have occurred to them. Neither are we to think it strange if, even as a matter of speculation, minds of great original power, like that of Socrates, should feel no intellectual repugnance to the main principles of a polytheistic faith. There is nothing fundamentally absurd in Polytheism, provided only a wise superintendent Providence be established somewhere to overrule the democratic assembly of subordinate gods; and this the Greeks had prominently in the person of Zeus.[88.1] The other gods, like the angels in the Christian theology, however much their power might be exaggerated by the reverence of particular localities, were in the comprehensive survey of a philosophic mind only the ministers of his supreme will, working harmoniously along with him in the sustainment of the divine fabric of the universe. With this view of Polytheism, pious-minded men such as Socrates, Xenophon, and Plutarch could be perfectly satisfied; and the extravagant and immoral stories about the gods, which excited the bile of Xenophanes and Plato, needed not necessarily to give them any offence. For why? these stories were matter of popular belief, not of intellectual decision or of sacerdotal dictation. A great national poet, like Pindar, might explain, or explain away, in the public assembly of the Greeks, any legends that appeared to him to contain matter unworthy of his lofty conception of the gods. So of course might a philosopher like Socrates. The peasants round Athens believed that the Wind Boreas came down in human form, and carried off the nymph Oreithyia from the banks of the Ilissus; this might or might not be true; Socrates certainly was not bound te believe it; and, as he himself tells us in the Phædrus, he was too busy with more important matters to trouble himself with inquiring into the truth or falsehood of sacred legends in a country where every fountain had its peculiar worship, and every river its divine genealogy. This easy dealing with questions about legends, however, did not in the least imply any want of sincerity in the attitude of doubting thinkers towards the main articles of the Polytheistic creed; on the contrary, the more pliable the legend the less danger was there of its standing in the way of an honest acceptance of the broad fundamental points of the general creed; and it is an altogether gratuitous supposition in a late distinguished writer[89.1] to suppose that when Socrates at his death gave as a dying injunction to his friends to sacrifice a cock, which he had vowed, to Æsculapius, he did this merely from the effect of habit, and that he really did not believe in the existence of the god whom the injunction immediately concerned. While the general evidence of the adherence of Socrates both in theory and practice to the popular creed is so strong, we have no right in any particular instance to set him down as insincere. Of his general sincerity on these matters there certainly can be no doubt. It is set forth distinctly in more than one dialogue of Xenophon, and harmonizes exactly with all that we read in Plato. The philosopher used the common kinds of divination practised by his countrymen, and gave special directions as to the subjects on which a wise man should consult the gods, and on which he should seek for direction from them rather than from his own reason. We have special testimony to the fact that on one occasion (see above, page 11) he, after a long period of pious meditation, offered up a prayer to the Sun; and one of the Platonic dialogues concludes with a prayer of Socrates in the following curt and significant style:—