THREE:Power-hammers operated by crank motion, adapted to the lighter kinds of work, are now commonly met with in the forging-shops of engineering establishments. They are usually of very simple construction, and I will mention only two points in regard to such hammers, which might be overlooked by an apprentice in examining them.Plato does, no doubt, make it a charge against the Sophists that their doctrines are not only false and immoral, but that they are put together without any regard for logical coherence. It would seem, however, that this style of attack belongs rather to the later and constructive than to the earlier and receptive period of his intellectual development. The original cause of his antagonism to the professional teachers seems to have been their general pretensions to knowledge, which, from the standpoint of universal scepticism, were, of course, utterly illusive; together with a feeling of aristocratic contempt for a calling in which considerations of187 pecuniary interest were involved, heightened in this instance by a conviction that the buyer received nothing better than a sham article in exchange for his money. Here, again, a parallel suggests itself with the first preaching of the Gospel. The attitude of Christ towards the scribes and Pharisees, as also that of St. Paul towards Simon Magus, will help us to understand how Plato, in another order of spiritual teaching, must have regarded the hypocrisy of wisdom, the intrusion of fraudulent traders into the temple of Delphic inspiration, and the sale of a priceless blessing whose unlimited diffusion should have been its own and only reward.