244 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHY 



Other j and such an unparalleled temper of complete 

 personal identification with the doctrine as was 

 even more new in the history of the world. Fore- 

 shadowings of the doctrine, though only foreshadow- 

 ings, there indeed had been ; they had even been 

 put into written record, generations before Jesus, 

 in the Greek thought of Socrates and of Plato. 

 But any such temper, any equivalent tone of life, we 

 cannot with truth affirm there had really been. For 

 not only did this Hellenic thought fail of consistency 

 with its highest glimpses, and so come far short of 

 full insight into the nature of divine and human 

 personality, but it failed to fill its discoverers with 

 that absolute and ever-vivid consciousness of benig- 

 nant relations between God and the soul, and thence 

 between all souls, as constituting the only real life 

 of the spirit, which is transparently the character- 

 istic personal trait of Jesus. To the great Greek 

 teachers, even to Socrates, as it still is practically 

 to us all, this one and only truth of living religion 

 was more or less but a distant tJiougJit, summoned 

 into direct consciousness at intervals by a reflective 

 effort, and brought to bear upon conduct amid the 

 clamours of our animal being. To Jesus, on the con- 

 trary, it is an ever-present perception, like light to 

 vision, like space to our movements, like time to our 

 projects in life. 



Manifestly, then, we are to say it must be the chief 



