Justified True Belief

(●) The first of the sophists, the paid teachers of Greece, whose one sentence, that man is the measure of all things, is where relativism begins. + Every generation has a phrase that does the work of an argument. "Who is to say?" is ours. "That may be true for you" is another. Both of them are twenty-four centuries old, and both were first said, in a more careful form, by a traveling teacher from the Thracian coast who charged for his lessons and was proud of it. Protagoras is the man the word "sophist" was made for. A sophist was a paid teacher of the skills a citizen needed to get on in a democracy, above all the skill of speaking persuasively, and Protagoras was the first to take the name openly and set a price. He was famous, rich, welcome at the table of Pericles, and trusted with drafting the laws of a new city. He also wrote the sentence that Plato spent two dialogues answering and that Aristotle treated as the standing threat to the possibility of thinking at all: man is the measure of all things. He is on a Christian apologetics site because of that sentence and one other. The other opens his book on the gods, and says that he cannot know whether they exist, because the question is dark and life is short. Between them the two sentences mark out the ground on which a great deal of the modern argument about God and morality is still fought, and it is worth meeting the man who first surveyed it, and finding that he was neither a fool nor a villain.

(●) c. 490 BC: He was born at Abdera, a Greek town on the Thracian coast, a decade before a Persian army marched through it. + Abdera sat on the north shore of the Aegean, in Thrace, the rough country the Greeks thought of as the edge of the civilized world. It was a prosperous port and, oddly for a town the rest of Greece joked about as a home of simpletons, it produced two of the sharpest minds of the century: Protagoras, and a generation later Democritus, the philosopher of atoms. The dates are a reconstruction, and it is worth seeing how it was done. Apollodorus, an ancient chronographer (a scholar whose whole business was working out when people had lived), put Protagoras’s prime in the 84th Olympiad, and since Greek historians counted years by the Olympic games, held every four years, that means the four-year stretch from 444 to 441 BC. He also gave him seventy years of life. Plato, for his part, has Socrates say in the Meno that he died at about seventy after forty years in his profession. Work backward from the two and you get a birth around 490 BC, the year of Marathon, when the Athenians beat the first Persian invasion on the plain by the sea, and a death around 420. That "around" is why nearly every date in his life carries a "c." Of his youth we have only stories. Diogenes Laertius, the compiler of philosophers’ lives, says he began as a porter, and that Democritus took him up after noticing how cleverly he tied his bundles of firewood; the trouble is that Democritus was some thirty years younger, so if there was a teacher and pupil the roles must have run the other way. Philostratus, writing seven centuries after the fact, adds that his father entertained King Xerxes when the Persian army passed through in 480, and got the boy an education from the Persian magi, the priestly caste of Persia. Neither story can be checked. What they agree on is that he came from nowhere in particular and taught himself.

(●) c. 460 BC: He called himself a sophist in public, set a price on wisdom, and became rich on it. + Athens in the middle of the fifth century was a democracy in which a man’s fortune could turn on a single speech in the assembly or the courts, and there was no one to teach him how to make it. Protagoras saw the gap. He traveled from city to city offering, for a fee, to make young men better at managing their households and their cities, and he did it under a name that others were shy of. In Plato’s Protagoras he explains that the wise men of the past disguised themselves as poets or priests to avoid the envy of the crowd, and that he takes "an entirely opposite course," acknowledging himself "to be a Sophist and instructor of mankind," since an open profession is a better protection than concealment. He was the first, Diogenes says, to charge a hundred minae for a course. A mina was a weight of silver, a hundred drachmas, and a drachma was about a day’s pay for a skilled man, so this was a sum that would have kept a workman for years, and Plato has Socrates remark that he made more from his craft than the sculptor Pheidias, the man who built the Parthenon’s statues. Yet the arrangement was fairer than it sounds. A pupil who thought the course not worth the price could go into a temple, swear on oath what he thought the lessons were worth, and pay that instead. Protagoras was confident enough in his product to let the customer name the price under the eyes of the gods. He moved in the best company. Plutarch, the Greek biographer who wrote five centuries later, tells of Pericles, the leading statesman of Athens, spending a whole day with Protagoras arguing about an athlete who had accidentally killed a spectator with a javelin: was the death the fault of the javelin, of the thrower, or of the officials who organized the games? Pericles’ son, who thought his father should have had better things to do, told the story as a joke against him. It is a fair picture of the two men, and of the kind of question Protagoras liked.

(●) 444 BC: Athens chose him to write the laws for a new city in Italy. + In 444 BC Athens sponsored a colony called Thurii on the instep of Italy, near the site of the old Greek city of Sybaris. It was meant as a showpiece, a city open to settlers from all of Greece rather than just Athens, and the historian Herodotus was among those who went. Heraclides of Pontus, a pupil of Plato, recorded that Protagoras was commissioned to draft its laws. It is worth stopping to weigh what that means. The man later remembered as the father of relativism was trusted, at the height of his fame, with the one job that assumes justice can be written down and imposed. Heraclides does not say who chose him, but the colony was Pericles’ project and the choice was made at Athens, and Athens did not pick a man it thought believed that nothing was really right or wrong. It picked the best available authority on what makes a city work, and the choice fits what Protagoras actually taught about cities, in the story he told of how justice came to be given to everyone (T3). Nothing of the code survives. The traditions about Thurii’s constitution are late and confused, and no ancient writer quotes a single law of Protagoras. The commission itself, though, is one of the few solid facts in the life, and it is the one that most complicates the easy picture of him.

(●) c. 433 BC: At the house of the richest man in Athens he debated the young Socrates on whether goodness can be taught. + Plato’s dialogue the Protagoras opens before dawn. A young Athenian hammers on Socrates’ door with the news that Protagoras is in town, staying at the house of Callias, the wealthiest man in the city, and the two of them walk over to find the house full of celebrities: Protagoras pacing the colonnade with a train of admirers behind him, the sophists Hippias and Prodicus holding court in other rooms. The scene is set a few years before the great war with Sparta, the Peloponnesian War, when Socrates was about thirty-six and Protagoras, by his own account, old enough to be the father of anyone present. The question Socrates brings is whether virtue can be taught, which is a polite way of asking whether Protagoras is selling anything real. Protagoras answers with the finest thing that survives under his name, a myth about how the gods equipped the animals and forgot man, and how Zeus, seeing that men could not live together, sent them justice and reverence, and sent them to everyone (T3). The rest of the dialogue is a long and often bad-tempered wrestling match about the unity of the virtues, that is, whether courage, justice, wisdom and the rest are one thing under several names or several different things, and it ends with the two men having swapped positions and Socrates suggesting they meet again. It is worth noticing how Plato treats him. He is a comic figure in places, vain about his following and fussy about the rules of debate, but Plato lets him make the best speech in the dialogue and never once calls him a fraud. Plato disliked what the sophists sold. He plainly respected the man who sold it best.

(●) c. 420 BC: His book on the gods is said to have got him banished from Athens and burned in the marketplace, and the earliest witness knows nothing of it. + The story is a good one and it has been told for two thousand years. Protagoras gave a public reading of his book On the Gods, at the house of the playwright Euripides according to one report, and the book opened with the sentence that he could not know whether the gods existed. Athens, the story goes, prosecuted him for impiety, the crime of disrespect toward the gods, drove him out of the city, sent a herald round to collect every copy of the book, and burned the lot in the agora, the marketplace at the heart of the city. Cicero, the Roman orator, tells it, Diogenes Laertius tells it, and Philostratus adds that he fled from island to island ahead of the Athenian navy and drowned in a small boat. Here is the difficulty. Plato, who was alive when Protagoras died and knew his pupils, has Socrates say in the Meno that Protagoras practiced for forty years, died at about seventy, "and during all that time he had a good reputation, which to this day he retains." A man hounded out of Athens and drowned at sea, whose books had been publicly burned, does not have an unbroken good reputation a generation later. Plato has every reason to mention a scandal and mentions none. Many scholars now think the trial and the burning are a later invention, perhaps grown out of the real prosecutions of Anaxagoras, the philosopher in Pericles’ circle, and of Socrates, and perhaps out of a wish to make the sentence about the gods look more dangerous than Athens found it. Others hold that something happened in the anxious years just before the war with Sparta, around 432, when Plutarch reports that a seer named Diopeithes carried a decree against those who did not believe in the gods. The honest verdict is that we do not know, and that the earliest and best-placed witness leans hard against the story. What is not in dispute is the sentence itself. He wrote it, it was famous in his lifetime, and it survives whole, in his own words, the sentence that he could not know whether the gods exist (Q).

(●) c. 420 BC: He died at about seventy, his books did not survive, and Plato kept him alive by arguing with him for the rest of his own long life. + Diogenes gives two accounts of the death: a shipwreck on the way to Sicily, which the historian Philochorus reported and which Euripides was thought to allude to in a lost play, or simply death on a journey at an advanced age. Apollodorus’s seventy years and Plato’s "about seventy" agree, and 420 BC or a little earlier is as close as anyone can get. Of his writings nothing survives entire. Diogenes lists twelve titles and omits the two most famous, Truth and On the Gods, which shows how partial even the ancient lists had become. What we have is a handful of sentences quoted by other people, and one long speech that Plato put in his mouth and that most scholars think preserves the shape of a real work. His afterlife was Plato’s doing. Plato wrote a dialogue named for him, made him the chief opponent of the Theaetetus, his great inquiry into what knowledge is, and returned to him in the Cratylus, the Euthydemus, the Sophist, and the Laws. Aristotle took up the argument where Plato left it. No thinker who wrote so little has been answered at such length, and the answering has never really stopped, because the position keeps coming back under new names.

What He Taught

(T1) Man is the measure of all things: what seems so to you is so, for you. + Two people walk out of the same door into the same wind. One shivers and goes back for a coat. The other, just off a ferry from the north, thinks it is a mild evening. Ask them whether the wind is cold and you get two honest and opposite answers. Now ask the question Protagoras asked: which of them is right? His answer was that the question has no more content than the two answers already gave it. The wind is cold to the one and not cold to the other, and there is no third fact, "cold in itself," hiding behind the two experiences for them to be right or wrong about. That is what the famous sentence means when it is read carefully. Man, each man, is the measure: the standard by which things count as being so or not so. Things are to you as they appear to you. Plato reports the doctrine with the wind example in the Theaetetus, and reports that Protagoras opened his book Truth with it. Two things need saying at once. The first is that this is not silly. Protagoras had noticed something real about perception, that a sensation is not a mistake, and that "the wind is cold" reports a relation between the wind and a body rather than a property of the wind alone. The second is that he did not stop at wind. He ran the principle out to everything, including what is just and good, so that whatever a city judges to be just is just, for that city, as long as it holds the judgment (T4). Relativism is the modern name for that: the view that truth, or at least moral truth, is always truth for someone, and never truth full stop. Scholars still argue whether he meant "man" as each individual or as mankind, and whether the doctrine was a theory of knowledge or a rule for practical life. Plato read it the first way, each person as his own measure, and took it in the hard sense, as a theory of what knowledge is rather than a rule of thumb, and it is Plato’s reading that history answered.

(Q) "Man is the measure of all things, of things that are that they are, and of things that are not that they are not." + Source: Protagoras, Truth, opening sentence, as quoted in Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers ix. 51 (Hicks translation, 1925). The sentence survives in several ancient quotations and they agree closely; Plato gives it in the same Greek at Theaetetus 152a, and Sextus Empiricus, a professional skeptic writing around AD 200, preserves it as well. Truth also went by a second title, Knock-down Arguments, which tells you how its author thought of it. The Greek for "man" is anthropos, a human being rather than a male, and the ambiguity between "each human" and "humanity" has been argued over ever since (T1).

(T2) Every question has two opposing sides, and a trained speaker can make the weaker side win. + Anyone who has sat on a school debating team has met the exercise: you are handed a side, sometimes the side you do not believe, and told to win with it. That exercise is Protagoras’s invention, or as near to it as anything in history has an inventor. Diogenes credits him with being the first to hold that there are two arguments on every matter, opposed to each other, and the first to teach by setting them against one another. Clement of Alexandria, a Christian writing six centuries later, still knew the practice by his name. The commercial version of the doctrine was the slogan Aristotle quotes and disapproves of in the Rhetoric: Protagoras promised to make the weaker argument the stronger. Aristophanes, the comic playwright, put it on stage in the Clouds as a wrestling match between Right Argument and Wrong Argument, in which Wrong wins, and the play helped fix the word "sophistry" with the meaning it has kept ever since. There is a story, probably invented but told about him for good reason, of a pupil named Euathlus who refused to pay his fee until he had won his first case. Protagoras sued him and argued that if he won the suit he must be paid by the court’s verdict, and if he lost, the pupil had won a case and must pay by the terms of the contract. The pupil, a good student, argued the exact reverse. It is worth separating the two claims. That most questions have two sides worth hearing is simply true, and the whole tradition of examining a case from both directions, from the medieval disputation (the university exercise in which a student defended a thesis against all comers) to the modern courtroom, descends from it. That a skilled speaker can make the worse case prevail is also true, and it is a warning rather than a boast. Protagoras seems to have meant both, and the question the rest of philosophy asked him was whether, once you have admitted that every case can be argued either way, you still believe there is a fact about which way is right (T1, T4).

(Q) "There are two sides to every question, opposed to each other." + Source: Protagoras, as reported in Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers ix. 51 (Hicks translation, 1925). Diogenes gives this as the thesis Protagoras was the first to maintain, in his own words so far as a compiler more than six centuries later could give them. The Greek is duo logous einai peri pantos pragmatos antikeimenous allelois, two accounts about every matter, set against each other. Seneca, the Roman Stoic (the Stoics were the school that taught living by reason and keeping one’s composure whatever happened), quotes the same doctrine and notices the sting in its tail: if one can argue with equal force on either side of anything, then one can argue with equal force against the claim that one can argue with equal force on either side of anything (T2).

(T3) Justice and reverence were given to everyone, which is why virtue can be taught and cities can stand. + Here is the surprise in Protagoras. Asked by Socrates to prove that goodness can be taught, the father of relativism told a story about the gods giving morality to mankind. The gods, he says, made the animals out of earth and fire and told two brothers to equip them. Epimetheus, whose name means Afterthought, handed out the gifts: speed to one creature, strength to another, wings, claws, thick hides, and by the time he reached man he had nothing left, and man stood there naked and shoeless. His brother Prometheus, Forethought, stole fire and the crafts from the gods to make good the blunder, so that men could feed and house themselves. But they could not live together. They gathered in cities for safety and then wronged each other and scattered again, and Zeus, fearing the race would be destroyed, sent Hermes, the messenger of the gods, down with two gifts, reverence and justice, to be "the ordering principles of cities and the bonds of friendship." Hermes asked whether to hand them out as the crafts are handed out, to a few experts, and Zeus said no: to all, for a city cannot exist if only a few share in justice. The argument is tucked inside the story, and it is a good one. We let anyone speak in the assembly on questions of justice, though we let only shipwrights speak about ships, because we assume that everyone has a share of justice. We punish wrongdoers rather than pitying them as we pity the ugly or the short, because we assume that goodness can be acquired and that they could have acquired it. Punishment is itself a form of teaching. Whether Zeus is a literal giver in the story or a figure for how human societies came to be, Protagoras is saying that the moral sense is universal, that it is what makes society possible, and that the sophist merely does with more care what every parent and every city already does. A Christian reader will hear something familiar. Paul writes that Gentiles who never received the Law "they show that the work of the law is written on their hearts" (Romans 2:15). Protagoras did not think that. But he saw the fact Paul is explaining, that the moral sense is standard equipment, and he saw it from the outside, with no Scripture to help him, which is worth something.

(Q) "'To all,' said Zeus; 'I should like them all to have a share; for cities cannot exist, if a few only share in the virtues, as in the arts.'" + Source: Plato, Protagoras 322d (Jowett translation). The words are Plato’s, put in Protagoras’s mouth; the speech is so unlike anything else in Plato, and so like what other sources say Protagoras wrote about the origins of society, that most scholars take it to preserve the substance of a lost work, possibly the one Diogenes lists as Of the Ancient Order of Things. Hermes has just asked whether justice and reverence should go to a few, as medicine does, and Zeus answers (T3).

(T4) No opinion is truer than another, but some are better, and the wise man is the one who can change yours. + You might think, at this point, that the two halves of the man do not fit. If every opinion is true for whoever holds it, what is a teacher for? Socrates asked exactly that, and rather rudely: if truth is only what appears to each person, Protagoras might as well have begun his book by announcing that a pig or a baboon is the measure of all things, and why should anyone pay him to be taught? Plato was fair enough to write Protagoras a reply, and it is the most interesting passage about him that survives. The sick man’s food tastes bitter to him and the healthy man’s tastes sweet, and neither is mistaken; but one condition is better than the other, and the doctor changes the worse into the better with drugs. The sophist, says Protagoras, does the same thing with words. He does not make a man think truly where before he thought falsely, because on his principles no one ever thinks falsely; he makes a man have better thoughts instead of worse ones. And what holds for a man holds for a city. Whatever a city thinks just is just for it, for as long as it thinks so; the wise speaker persuades it to think something more useful instead. Wisdom is real. It is just not knowledge of the truth. It is skill at improvement. This is a serious position and it has had a long life; the American pragmatists of the last century (William James and his school) held something very like it, and so does anyone who says that a belief is "true" if it works. The cost is also plain, and Socrates named it. "Better" has to mean something. If it means "seems better to me," the sophist is back where he started, selling his own preferences. If it means "really better," then there is a fact about what is good that does not depend on anyone’s seeming, and man is not the measure after all. Protagoras never had to choose, because he died before Plato wrote the dilemma down. Everyone after him has had to.

(Q) "Not that any one ever made another think truly, who previously thought falsely. For no one can think what is not, or think anything different from that which he feels; and this is always true. But as the inferior habit of mind has thoughts of kindred nature, so I conceive that a good mind causes men to have good thoughts; and these which the inexperienced call true, I maintain to be only better, and not truer than others." + Source: Plato, Theaetetus 167a–b (Jowett translation). Socrates is speaking in Protagoras’s person, at the request of Theodorus, the old mathematician who shares the conversation and had been Protagoras’s friend, to give the dead man the defense he cannot make for himself. The passage is often called the Defense of Protagoras, and whether it is Protagoras or Plato improving on him has been argued for a century. Either way it is the most careful statement of the relativist position in ancient literature, made by its greatest opponent (T4).

(Q) "As to the gods, I have no means of knowing either that they exist or that they do not exist. For many are the obstacles that impede knowledge, both the obscurity of the question and the shortness of human life." + Source: Protagoras, On the Gods, opening sentence, as quoted in Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers ix. 51 (Hicks translation, 1925). The most famous agnostic sentence in antiquity, and probably the first. Eusebius, the Christian historian, preserves a shorter form that adds "nor of what nature they are," and Cicero has the Roman version. Notice what it does not say. It does not deny the gods, and it gives its reasons: the subject is dark, and a human life is not long enough to settle it. Both reasons are answerable, and Eusebius and Paul between them answer both (†).

What Christian Thinkers Made of Him

(†) Plato gave the reply that every later answer has repeated: the doctrine that all opinions are true refutes itself. + The Christian answer to Protagoras was first written by a pagan, and Christians have been borrowing it ever since. In the Theaetetus Socrates points out that nearly everyone believes Protagoras is wrong. On his own principle, their belief is true for them. So Protagoras, by holding that every opinion is true, "concedes about his own opinion the truth of the opinion of those who disagree with him and think that his opinion is false" (Theaetetus 171a, in Fowler’s translation). His Truth, Socrates concludes, is true for no one, not even for its author. Philosophers call this a peritrope, a turning of the tables, and it is the standing objection to every relativism since. Say "there is no truth" and you have asserted a truth. Say "all morality is relative" and you have made a claim you expect to hold for everyone, including the people who disagree. Aristotle pressed the same point in the Metaphysics, arguing that Protagoras’s doctrine stands or falls with the principle that a thing cannot both be and not be at the same time, and that a man who gives up that principle has given up saying anything at all. Notice that the argument does not prove that any particular thing is true. It proves only that "nothing is true" cannot be. That is a smaller result than it looks in the heat of debate, and the honest Christian use of it is the modest one: relativism is not a resting place, and a person who has seen through it is back at the beginning, with the real questions still open and a reason to take them seriously.

(†) The church fathers kept only his sentence on the gods, and kept it as evidence of what reason alone had reached. + Protagoras is nearly invisible in early Christian writing, and the invisibility is itself informative. The fathers argued with Plato, the Stoics, and Epicurus, the philosophies that still had followers. Protagoras had none. What survived of him in Christian hands was two things: Clement of Alexandria’s passing note that the Greeks credited him with inventing the practice of opposing one argument with another, and the sentence about the gods, which Eusebius of Caesarea copied into his Preparation for the Gospel around AD 315. Eusebius’s use of it is worth understanding, because it is the pattern for how Christians have read him since. The Preparation is a vast argument that Greek philosophy, left to itself, never reached agreement about the divine, and that its best minds ended in contradiction or confessed ignorance. Protagoras is exhibit A for the confession. Here was the most celebrated teacher of his age saying plainly that on the one question that mattered most he could not know. For Eusebius that was not a scandal. It was an admission, and an argument: if unaided reason ends here, then either the question is closed or God must speak first. The Bible had said as much already. "The world did not know God through wisdom" (1 Corinthians 1:21) is Paul’s summary of exactly the situation Protagoras described from the inside. Where Protagoras stopped, at the obscurity of the subject and the shortness of life, Christianity claims that the subject has made itself plain, and that the shortness of life is precisely why it did not wait for us to finish the inquiry.

(†) Twenty-four centuries later his doctrine became everyone’s default, and C. S. Lewis answered it without ever needing to name him. + For most of Western history Protagoras was a museum piece, the man Plato refuted. Then, somewhere in the last hundred and fifty years, his position stopped being a heresy and became the water everyone swam in. "True for you" moved from the lecture hall to the kitchen table. Nobody had to read Protagoras to become a Protagorean; the doctrine arrived through the air. C. S. Lewis noticed the moment it happened. In The Abolition of Man, in 1943, he opened with a school textbook that taught children, almost in passing, that to call a waterfall sublime is to say nothing about the waterfall and only something about one’s feelings. That is the wind that is cold to one man and not to another, transferred from temperature to value. Lewis’s reply runs for three lectures, and the heart of it is the older one: that every attempt to debunk all values must smuggle in a value to debunk them with, and that a culture which teaches its young that nothing is really good or really beautiful will produce what he called men without chests, people trained to feel nothing about what matters. He did not name Protagoras. He did not need to. The same reply appears at the start of Mere Christianity, where Lewis observes that people who quarrel appeal to a standard they both expect the other to know, and very seldom reply "to hell with your standard." The observation is Protagoras’s own myth turned against him. Zeus gave justice to all; Lewis’s point is that the gift shows up in the argument even of the person denying there was a gift.

(†) Where the gospel parts company with him: there is a measure, and it is not man; God can be known, because he made himself known; and a short life is the reason he came. + Here is the other column of the ledger, stated at full strength. The disagreement is not about whether Protagoras was clever or honest, because he was both; it is about the two sentences he is remembered for. - The measure. "Man is the measure of all things" has an exact opposite in Scripture, and it is a question: "Who has measured the waters in the hollow of his hand and marked off the heavens with a span?" (Isaiah 40:12). The Bible knows the Protagorean condition and gives it a name and a verdict. "In those days there was no king in Israel. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes" (Judges 21:25) is not offered as a description of freedom. And the prophet pronounces woe on "those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness" (Isaiah 5:20), which is only a sin if there is a fact about which is which. - The obscurity. Protagoras’s first reason for not knowing the gods was that the subject is dark. Paul’s answer is that it is not: "for his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse" (Romans 1:20). Christianity does not claim that God is easy to know. It claims that he is not hidden, and that the difficulty lies more in the knower than in the known. - The shortness of life. His second reason was that a human life is too brief to settle the question. Every Christian will grant the premise. The conclusion the gospel draws from it runs the other way: because the inquiry cannot be finished from our end, God finished it from his, and "he is actually not far from each one of us" (Acts 17:27). Protagoras’s agnosticism is the state a careful man arrives at if revelation has not happened. The Christian claim is that it has. - Where he was right. His myth said that justice and reverence were given to every human being, not to an expert few, and that no society can stand without them. That is very nearly the doctrine of conscience, and the moral argument for God assumes it. He was also right that the beginning of wisdom is not cleverness, though he did not know what it was. "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge" (Proverbs 1:7) names the piece he was missing. Protagoras was the first man to say, with reasons, that on the greatest question he could not know. It was an honest sentence and it has been a comfortable one, and the gospel’s reply to it is not an argument but an event: that the God he could not reach came the whole way down to be reached.