t, in a word, any kind of injustice towards me, or what is mine--is
a thing far worse and more odious for him who commits the injustice,
than for me who suffer it."[918] It is a great combat, he says, greater
than we think, that wherein the issue is whether we shall be virtuous or
wicked. Neither glory, nor riches, nor dignities, nor poetry, deserves
that we should neglect justice for them. The moral idea in Plato has
such intense truth and force, that it has at times a striking analogy
with the language of the Holy Scriptures.[919]

[Footnote 916: "Republic," bk. x. ch. xii.]

[Footnote 917: "Gorgias," Secs. 59-80.]

[Footnote 918: Ibid., Sec. 137.]

[Footnote 919: Pressense, "Religions before Christ," p. 129.]

The obligation of moral rectitude is, by Plato, derived from the
authoritative utterances of conscience as the voice of God. We must do
right because reason and conscience say it is right. In the "Euthyphron"
he maintains that the moral quality of actions is not dependent on the
arbitrary will of a Supreme Governor;--"an act is not holy because the
gods love it, but the gods love it because it is holy." The eternal law
of right dwells in the Eternal Reason of God, the idea of right in all
human minds is a ray of that Eternal Reason; and the requirement of the
divine law that we shall do right is, and must be, in harmony with both.

The present life is regarded by Plato as a state of probation and
discipline, the future life as one of reward and punishment.[920]

[Footnote 920: "Republic," bk. x. ch. xv., xvi.; "Laws," bk. x. ch.
xiii.]

Plato was thus to the heathen world "the great apostle of the moral
idea;" he followed up and completed the work of Socrates. "The voice of
God, that still found a profound echo in man's heart, possessed in him
an organ to which all Greece gave ear; and the austere revelation of
conscience this time embodied in language too harmonious not to entice
by the beauty of form, a nation of artists, they received it. The tables
of the eternal law, carved in purest marble and marvellously sculptured,
were read by them."

In Plato both the theistic conception and the moral idea seem to have
touched the zenith. The philosophy of Aristotle, considered as a whole,
appears on one side to have passed the line of the great Hellenic
period. If it did not inaugurate, it at least prepared the way for the
decline. It perfected logic, as the instrument of ratiocination, and
gave it exactne