IN his introduction to the "Parmenides" of Plato, a great translator says that the difficulty of philosophy in all ages is: "How can we get beyond the circle of our own ideas, or how remaining within them can we have any criterion of a truth beyond and independent of them? ... In some respects, the difficulty pressed harder upon the Greek than upon ourselves. For conceiving of God more under the attribute of knowledge than we do, he was more under the necessity of separating the divine from the human, as two spheres which had no communication with one another."
Even granting that this writer infused a more Christian spirit into Plato than that profound old thinker merits, the fact remains that the Greek philosopher, in company with some Scandinavian and also oriental philosophers, has reasoned out existence, and has come to the conclusion that God is good but mortal mind evil. He has also arrived at the significant fact that good and evil are incapable of mingling; that the good cannot enter the evil, neither can the evil search out the good. So far such reasoning should have been of great value to the human race. The clear distinction that good is good and evil is evil, that there is a fundamental truth, the spiritual fact, and a supposititious antitruthful and anti-spiritual force called matter and mortal ignorance, has been a definite and lasting contribution to the world's mental wealth.
But such writers as Plato have not given us any link by which a pure and perfect creator can come within the recognition of sinful and suffering man as he is thrust upon our daily vision. The bridge for which the modern thinker asks has still to be built. Unless such connection between God and man is possible and practical, and the divine Principle of being can be received and assimilated, how can the rule of heaven be established upon earth? Philosophy, religion, and the sciences are each as helpless as the other, and the dust of pagan ages still marks out the cinder track of the metaphysical stadium round which the feet of earth's weary competitors run from start to finish, from finish to start, for an unforth-coming prize.
