is among such that we find the instances memorable in history, when
the arm of the law has been employed to root out the best men and
the noblest doctrines; with deplorable success as to the men, though
some of the doctrines have survived to be (as if in mockery) invoked
in defence of similar conduct towards those who dissent from them,
or from their received interpretation.

  Mankind can hardly be too often reminded, that there was once a
man named Socrates, between whom and the legal authorities and
public opinion of his time there took place a memorable collision.
Born in an age and country abounding in individual greatness, this man
has been handed down to us by those who best knew both him and the
age, as the most virtuous man in it; while we know him as the head and
prototype of all subsequent teachers of virtue, the source equally
of the lofty inspiration of Plato and the judicious utilitarianism
of Aristotle, "i mastri di color che sanno," the two headsprings of
ethical as of all other philosophy. This acknowledged master of all
the eminent thinkers who have since lived- whose fame, still growing
after more than two thousand years, all but outweighs the whole
remainder of the names which make his native city illustrious- was
put to death by his countrymen, after a judicial conviction, for
impiety and immorality. Impiety, in denying the gods recognised by the
State; indeed his accuser asserted (see the Apologia) that he believed
in no gods at all. Immorality, in being, by his doctrines and
instructions, a "corruptor of youth." Of these charges the tribunal,
there is every ground for believing, honestly found him guilty, and
condemned the man who probably of all then born had deserved best of
mankind to be put to death as a criminal.

  To pass from this to the only other instance of judicial iniquity,
the mention of which, after the condemnation of Socrates, would not be
an anti-climax: the event which took place on Calvary rather more than
eighteen hundred years ago. The man who left on the memory of those
who witnessed his life and conversation such an impression of his
moral grandeur that eighteen subsequent centuries have done homage
to him as the Almighty in person, was ignominiously put to death, as
what? As a blasphemer. Men did not merely mistake their benefactor;
they mistook him for the exact contrary of what he was, and treated
him as that prodigy of impiety which they themselves are now held to
be for their treatment of him. The feelings with which mankind now
regard these lamentable transactions, especially the later of the two,
render them extremely unjust in their judgment of the unhappy
actors. These were, to all appearance, not bad men- not worse than
men commonly are, but rather the contrary; men who possessed in a
full, or somewhat more than a full measure, the religious, moral,
and patriotic feelings of their time and people: the very kind of
men who, in all times, our own included, have every chance of
passing through life blameless and respected. The high-priest who rent
his garments when the words were pronounced, which, according to all
the ideas of his country, constituted the blackest guilt, was in all
probability quite as sincere in his horror and indignation as the
generality of respectable and pious men now are in the religious and
moral sentiments they profess; and most of those who now shudder at
his conduct, if they had lived in his time, and been born Jews,
would have acted precisely as he did. Orthodox Christians who are
tempted to think that those who stoned to death the first martyrs must
have been worse men than they themselves are, ought to remember that
one of those persecutors was Saint Paul.

  Let us add one more example, the most striking of all, if the
impressiveness of an error is measured by the wisdom and virtue of him
who falls into it. If ever any one, possessed of power, had grounds
for thinking himself the best and most enlightened among his
contemporaries, it was the Emperor Marcus Aurelius. Absolute monarch
of the whole civilised world, he preserved through life not only the
most unblemished justice, but what was less to be expected from his
Stoical breeding, the tenderest heart. The few failings which are
attributed to him were all on the side of indulgence: while his
writings, the highest ethical product of the ancient mind, differ
scarcely perceptibly, if they differ at all, from the most
characteristic teachings of Christ. This man, a better Christian in
all but the dogmatic sense of the word than almost any of the
ostensibly Christian sovereigns who have since reigned, persecuted
Christianity. Placed at the summit of all the previous attainments
of humanity, with an open, unfettered intellect, and a character which
led him of himself to embody in his moral writings the Christian
ideal, he yet failed to see that Christianity was to be a good and not
an evil to the world, with his duties to which he was so deeply
penetrated. Existing society he knew to be in a deplorable state.
But such as it was, he saw, or thought he saw, that it was held
together, and prevented from being worse, by belief and reverence of
the received divinities. As a ruler of mankind, he deemed it his
duty not to suffer society to fall in pieces; and saw not how, if
its existing ties were removed, any others could be formed which could
again knit it together. The new religion openly aimed at dissolving
these ties: unless, therefore, it was his duty to adopt that religion,
it seemed to be his duty to put it down. Inasmuch then as the theology
of Christianity did not appear to him true or of divine origin;
inasmuch as this strange history of a crucified God was not credible
to him, and a system which purported to rest entirely upon a
foundation to him so wholly unbelievable, could not be foreseen by him
to be that renovating agency which, after all abatements, it has in
fact proved to be; the gentlest and most amiable of philosophers and
rulers, under a solemn sense of duty, authorised the persecution of
Christianity.

  To my mind this is one of the most tragical facts in all history. It
is a bitter thought, how different a thing the Christianity of the
world might have been, if the Christian faith had been adopted as
the religion of the empire under the auspices of Marcus Aurelius