so persistently the charge that Christ borrowed from Plato what was true in His teaching, that Ambrose wrote a treatise to confute them.  As a rule, the Christians did not deny the resemblance, but explained it by saying that Plato had plagiarised from Moses—­a curious notion which we find first in Philo.  In the Middle Ages the mystics almost canonised Plato:  Eckhart speaks of him, quaintly enough, as “the great priest” (der grosse Pfaffe); and even in Spain, Louis of Granada calls him “divine,” and finds in him “the most excellent parts of Christian wisdom.”  Lastly, in the seventeenth century the English Platonists avowed their intention of bringing back the Church to “her old loving nurse the Platonic philosophy.”  These English Platonists knew what they were talking of; but for the mediaeval mystics Platonism meant the philosophy of Plotinus adapted by Augustine, or that of Proclus adapted by Dionysius, or the curious blend of Platonic, Aristotelian, and Jewish philosophy which filtered through into the Church by means of the Arabs.  Still, there was justice underlying this superficial ignorance.  Plato is, after all, the father of European Mysticism.[109] Both the great types of mystics may appeal to him—­those who try to rise through the visible to the invisible, through Nature to God, who find in earthly beauty the truest symbol of the heavenly, and in the imagination—­the image-making faculty—­a raft whereon we may navigate the shoreless ocean of the Infinite; and those who distrust all sensuous representations as tending “to nourish appetites which we ought to starve,” who look upon this earth as a place of banishment, upon material things as a veil which hides God’s face from us, and who bid us “flee away from hence as quickly as may be,” to seek “yonder,” in the realm of the ideas, the heart’s true home.  Both may find in the real Plato much congenial teaching—­that the highest good is the greatest likeness to God—­that the greatest happiness is the vision of God—­that we should seek holiness not for the sake of external reward, but because it is the health of the soul, while vice is its disease—­that goodness is unity and harmony, while evil is discord and disintegration—­that it is our duty and happiness to rise above the visible and transitory to the invisible and permanent.  It may also be a pleasure to some to trace the fortunes of the positive and negative elements in Plato’s teaching—­of the humanist and the ascetic who dwelt together in that large mind; to observe how the world-renouncing element had to grow at the expense of the other, until full justice had been done to its claims; and then how the brighter, more truly Hellenic side was able to assert itself under due safeguards, as a precious thing dearly purchased, a treasure reserved for the pure and humble, and still only to be tasted carefully, with reverence and godly fear.  There is, of course, no necessity for connecting this development with the name of Plato.  The