It lives on through the ages, speaking as a voice from the dead, and influencing minds living thousands of years apart.

Thus, Moses and David and Solomon, Plato and Socrates and Xenophon, Seneca and Cicero and Epictetus, still speak to us as from their tombs.

They still arrest the attention, and exercise an influence upon character, though their thoughts be conveyed in languages unspoken by them and in their time unknown.

Theodore Parker has said that a single man like Socrates was worth more to a country than many such states as South Carolina; that if that state went out of the world to-day, she would not have done so much for the world as Socrates.

[1017] Great workers and great thinkers are the true makers of history, which is but continuous humanity influenced by men of character--by great leaders, kings, priests, philosophers, statesmen, and patriots--the true aristocracy of man.