to affirms that this is the most just cause of the
creation of the world, that works which are good should be
wrought by the God who is good; whether he had read these
things in the Bible, or whether by his penetrating genius he
beheld _the invisible things of God as understood by the
things which are made_"--ST. AUGUSTINE, "De Civ. Dei," lib.
xi. ch. 21.

Of all the monuments of the greatness of Athens which have survived the
changes and the wastes of time, the most perfect and the most enduring
is her philosophy. The Propylaea, the Parthenon, and the Erechtheum,
those peerless gems of Grecian architecture, are now in ruins. The
magnificent sculpture of Phidias, which adorned the pediment, and outer
cornice, and inner frieze of these temples, and the unrivalled statuary
of gods and heroes which crowded the platform of the Acropolis, making
it an earthly Olympus, are now no more, save a few broken fragments
which have been carried to other lands, and, in their exile, tell the
mournful story of the departed grandeur of their ancient home. The
brazen statue of Minerva, cast from the spoils of Marathon, which rose
in giant grandeur above the buildings of the Acropolis, and the flashing
of whose helmet plumes was seen by the mariner as soon as he had rounded
the Sunian promontory; and that other brazen Pallas, called, by
pre-eminence, "the Beautiful;" and the enormous Colossus of ivory and of
gold, "the Immortal Maid"--the protecting goddess of the
Parthenon--these have perished. But whilst the fingers of time have
crumbled the Pentelic marble, and the glorious statuary has been broken
to pieces by vandal hands, and the gold and brass have been melted in
the crucibles of needy monarchs and converted into vulgar money, the
philosophic _thought_ of Athens, which culminated in the dialectic of
Plato, still survives. Not one of all the vessels, freighted with
immortal thought, which Plato launched upon the stream of time, has
foundered. And after the vast critical movement of European thought
during the past two centuries, in which all philosophic systems have
been subjected to the severest scrutiny, the _method_ of Plato still
preserves, if not its exclusive authority unquestioned, at least its
intellectual pre-eminence unshaken. "Platonism is immortal, because its
principles are immortal in the human intellect and heart."[380]

[Footnote 380: Butler's "Lectures on Ancient Philosophy," vol.