Note (return) — Chapter XV
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Platonism reveals a still closer affinity with Christianity in its doctrine of sin, and its sense of the need of salvation. Plato is sacredly jealous for the honor and purity of the divine character, and rejects with indignation every hypothesis which would make God the author of sin. "God, inasmuch as he is good, can not be the cause of all things, as the common doctrine represents him to be. On the contrary, he is the author of only a small part of human affairs; of the larger part he is not the author; for our evil things far outnumber our good things. The good things we must ascribe to God, whilst we must seek elsewhere, and not in him, the causes of evil." 956 The doctrine of the poets, which would in some way charge on the gods the errors of men, he sternly resists. We must express our disapprobation of Homer, or any other poet, if guilty of such foolish blunders about the gods as to tell us 957