Socrates: "Does a man who is in training, and who is in earnest about it, attend to the praise and blame of all men, or of the one man who is doctor or trainer?"
Crito: "He attends only to the opinion of the one man."
Socrates: "Then he ought to fear the blame and welcome the praise of the one man, not the many?"
Crito: "Clearly."
And Socrates sums the argument thus: "To be brief; is it not the same in everything?"
Surely the wise man spoke the truth: it is the same in everything. The one thing that matters is the opinion of the One. If He is satisfied, all is well. If He is dissatisfied, the commendation of the many is as froth. "Blessed are the single-hearted, for they shall have much peace."
But Nature is full of pictures of bright companionship in service; the very stars shine in constellations. This book of the skies has been opening up to us of late. Who, to whom the experience is new, will forget the first evenings spent with even a small telescope, but powerful enough to distinguish double stars and unveil nebulæ? You look and see a single point of light, and you look again and twin suns float like globes of fire on a midnight sea; and sometimes one flashes golden yellow and the other blue, each the complement of the other, like two perfectly responsive friends. You look and see a little lonely cloud, a breath of transparent mist; you look and see spaces sprinkled with diamond dust, or something even more awesome, reaches of radiance that seem to lie on the borderland of Eternity.
And the shining glory lingers and lights up the common day, for the story of the sky is the story of life.
Far was the Call, and farther as I followed
Grew there a silence round my Lord and me—
is for ever the inner story, as for ever the stars must move alone, however close they are set in constellations or strewn in clusters; but in another sense is it not true that there is the joy of companionship and the pure inspiration of comradeship? God fits twin souls together like twin suns; and sometimes, with delicate thought for even the sensitive pleasure of colour, it is as if He arranged them so that the gold and the blue coalesce.