If Egypt offered ground for the germination of the seed of pagan education, Greece brought the plant to its seed-producing state; and Rome, acting as the wind with the thistle down, _scattered pagan education broadcast_. Of Rome we read: “It gathered into its arms the elements of Grecian and Oriental culture, and as its end drew nigh, it scatters them freely over the rest of Europe. Rome has been the bearer of culture to the modern world.”[37] [Sidenote: Plato in education] In order to understand the fertility of the seeds of pagan education, it is necessary to regard with care the master mind of that system, and this we find in Plato. Emerson, in his “Representative Men,” defines his position and the position of his philosophy in the pagan and in the so-called Christian world, making the teachings of this Greek, schooled in Egypt, crowd out the Word of God itself. He says: “Out of Plato come all things that are still written and debated among men of thought.... _The Bible_ of the learned for twenty-two hundred years, every brisk young man, who says in succession fine things to each reluctant generation ( ... Erasmus, Bruno, Locke, Rousseau, Coleridge) is some reader of Plato.” That is saying that for twenty-two hundred years Plato and his educational system, known everywhere as Platonism, have taken the _place of the Bible to the leading minds of the world_. “Plato is philosophy, and philosophy, Plato,—at once the glory and the shame of mankind, since neither Saxon nor Roman have availed to add any idea to his categories,” continues Emerson. “No wife, no children had he, and the _thinkers of all civilized nations are his posterity_, and _are tinged_ with his mind. How many great men nature is incessantly sending up out of night, to be _his men,—Platonists_!” Then he gives a list of illustrious names who have stood for learning in the various ages of the world’s history, and continues: “Calvinism is in his [Plato’s] _Phædo_: Christianity is in it.” How little this writer knew of the power of the truth as given by Christ! Doubtless he formed his judgment from professedly Christian teachers. But he continues: “Mahometanism draws all its philosophy, in its handbook of morals, ... from him [Plato]. Mysticism finds in Plato all its texts. This citizen of a town in Greece is no villager nor patriot. An Englishman reads, and says, ‘How English!’ a German, ‘How Teutonic!’ an Italian, ‘How Roman and how Greek!’” And to show that the recognition of Plato is not stopped by the Atlantic, our versatile New England writer says: “Plato seems, to a reader in New England, an American genius.” Has the reader any suspicion that our American educational institutions may have recognized the universality of this master of philosophy, and adopted into their curricula his system of reasoning? One traces, without the aid of magnifiers, the thread of pagan philosophy throughout the American schools.