iews on the
character of the Supreme Being and the ultimate destination of humanity
which is found in the writings of Plato and the teachings of the Bible
is the consequence of _immediate_ inspiration. Origen, Jerome, Eusebius,
Clement, do not hesitate to affirm that Christ himself revealed his own
high prerogatives to the gifted Grecian. From this hypothesis, however,
the facts of the case compel them to make some abatements. In the
mid-current of this divine revelation are found many acknowledged
errors, which it is impossible to ascribe to the celestial illuminator.
Plato, then, was _partially_ inspired, and clouded the heavenly beam
with the remaining grossnesses of the natural sense.[868] Whilst a
third, and more reasonable, hypothesis was maintained by others. They
regarded man as "the offspring and image of the Deity," and maintained
there must be a correlation of the human and divine reason, and,
consequently, of all discovered truth to God. Therefore they expected to
find some traces of connection and correspondence between Divine and
human thought, and some kindred ideas in Philosophy and Revelation.
"Ideas," says St. Augustine, "are the primordial forms, as it were, the
immutable reason of things; they are not created, they are eternal, and
always the same: they are contained in the Divine intelligence and
without being subject to birth and death, they are _types_ according to
which is formed every thing that is born and dies." The copies of these
archetypes are seen in nature, and are participated in by the reason of
man; and there may therefore be some community of idea between man and
God, and some relation between Philosophy and Christianity.

[Footnote 868: Butler's "Lectures on Ancient Philosophy," vol. ii. p.
41.]

The various attempts which have been made to trace the elevated theism
and morality of Socrates and Plato to Jewish sources have signally
failed. Justin Martyr and Tertullian claim that the ancient philosophers
"borrowed from the Jewish prophets." Pythagoras and Plato are supposed
to have travelled in the East in quest of knowledge.[869] The latter is
imagined to have had access to an existing Greek version of the Old
Testament in Egypt, and a strange oversight in chronology brings him
into personal intercourse with the prophet Jeremiah. A sober and
enlightened criticism is compelled to pronounce all these statements as
mere exaggerations of later times.[870] They are obviously mere
suppos