Socrates: Master of Life

From the Introduction.
SHELLEY referred to the great man of our title as
"Socrates, the Jesus Christ of Greece,"
nor was the English poet the first or the last to institute the comparison. The fathers of the church, when answering the jests of paganism, cited the martyr of the hemlock beside the martyr of the cross; free-thinkers of yesterday and to-day have exalted his ethics and his mission in challenge to the Christian world and its prophet. He has been compared to Buddha and the religious reformers of the ancient kingdoms of Judah and Samaria. Yet, as we shall see, the historic Socrates was no religious zealot and founded no religion. The traditional figure is slowly but certainly undergoing modification wherever men have learned to distinguish Socrates from the men who walk either side or in front of him; the genuine voice is beginning to sound more clear as our ears separate it from Xenophon's confusing oratory and the insistent music of Plato. And now is there to be any longer reason for numbering Saul among the prophets? Has the instinct of the generations been wrong altogether? I think not. Socrates, in a sense that would justify honorable mention of his name and fame in any work on religious leaders, proclaimed long before Paul the unknown God unto the Athenians.
Socrates concerns us from the point of view of religious leadership on several grounds: as a soul interested in the salvation of man, as a life witnessing the laws of the spirit, as the central personality of a great people, and as an historic contrast to other more specifically religious types.
Socrates was interested in the salvation of man. Salvation shall be taken out of the vocabulary of the theologians where it has troubled the human race long enough: the salvation of man shall not mean any longer security on a day of judgment; nor even alone the loosening of the bonds of sin. It shall mean emancipation from all that hobbles or shackles the mind - emancipation from ignorance, uncouthness, stupidity, gloom, fear, and the whole interminable train of devils, among whom sin, though chief, is but one. The emancipators, the saviours, have been many: teachers in the village school, singers in the street, painters at the courts of kings, as well as prophets and poets on the mountain. What Socrates stood for in this multitudinous business of salvation will, I hope, be manifest to us in the sequel.