" Friends,
our great Master said not so; and most absolutely we shall find this
world is not made so. Indeed, to do the best for others, is finally to
do the best for ourselves; but it will not do to have our eyes fixed
on that issue. The Pagans had got beyond that. Hear what a Pagan says
of this matter; hear what were, perhaps, the last written words of
Plato,--if not the last actually written (for this we cannot know),
yet assuredly in fact and power his parting words--in which,
endeavouring to give full crowning and harmonious close to all his
thoughts, and to speak the sum of them by the imagined sentence of the
Great Spirit, his strength and his heart fail him, and the words
cease, broken off for ever. They are at the close of the dialogue
called _Critias_, in which he describes, partly from real tradition,
partly in ideal dream, the early state of Athens; and the genesis, and
order, and religion, of the fabled isle of Atlantis; in which genesis
he conceives the same first perfection and final degeneracy of man,
which in our own Scriptural tradition is expressed by saying that the
Sons of God inter-married with the daughters of men,[225] for he
supposes the earliest race to have been indeed the children of God;
and to have corrupted themselves, until "their spot was not the spot
of his children.
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