EVIDENCE AND EXAMPLES. 49 



Puegian skulls. Yet if the difference between a 

 Fuegian and a Goethe is one of anatomy and physiology, 

 so also is the difference between Socrates and King 

 David, between Csesar and Nero, between Milton and 

 a Court fool, between Cardinal Newman and Lord 

 Byron, between George Eliot and Joanna Southcott. 

 If at the moment of birth John Wesley could have 

 been placed in Robert Burns's cradle and circum- 

 stance, could he possibly have become an impassioned 

 singer and an ardent lover ? 



In Hebrew writings we are told that it is better 

 to live on a house-top than with a brawling woman. 

 Nothing is said of brawling men, yet there is no single , 

 type or feature of character which is peculiar to one sex. 

 There is nothing of nerve-organization, and therefore 

 nothing of character, which a woman may not transmit 

 to her son, and nothing which a man may not transmit to 

 his daughter. But the Hebrew ideal of woman was not 

 high. How different the women ideal and real of 

 the old Saxon heathen. They were true in affection, 

 devoted in help, capable in counsel. Very character- 

 istically our own Caedrnon gave to Eve a much higher 

 character than did the Hebrew writers. 



The wife of Socrates has been handed down to us as 

 a shrew perhaps justly so. Socrates is rightly 

 regarded as one of the world's loftiest characters, there 

 are good reasons however for supposing that he himself 

 was also a shrew. He was never at rest : he gave 

 others no rest. He questioned and lectured everybody 

 in season and out of season. To him notoriety was life, 

 and when tired of life he courted the crowning notoriety 

 of an ostentatious death. Probably not a few martyrs 

 have been men in whom the passion for life was feebler 

 than the ceaseless and long indulged and abnormal 



