committed an offence which our generosity might have pardoned, though our justice must recognize that it _needed_ pardon. “Plutarch himself may be entirely acquitted of any _conscious_ attempt to fight against that truth which was higher than any which he had” (p. 13).—“I have already mentioned that, _through no fault of his own_, he stood removed from all the immediate influences of the Christian Church” (p. 89). But suppose the facts to have been just the opposite of those indicated in the words we have italicized, it would involve the loss of all sense of historical perspective to draw the conclusion which would clearly have been drawn by Trench himself. The use of similar language by Prof. Mahaffy has already been noted. (Pref. p. xii.) The position assumed by writers who maintain this view, is one quite inappropriate for historical discussion, and its natural expression, if it must be expressed at all, is through the medium of such poetical aspirations as that breathed in the epigram of John, the Metropolitan of Euchaita:— “If any Pagans, Lord, Thy grace shall save From wrath divine, this boon I humbly crave, Plato and Plutarch save: Thine was the cause Their speech supported: Thine, too, were the laws Their hearts obeyed; and if their eyes were blind To recognize Thee Lord of human kind, Needs only that Thy gift of grace be shown To bring them, and bring all men, to the Throne.” [373] Dr. Martineau (_Types of Ethical Theory_, vol. i. p. 91) thinks that “we must go a little further than Zeller, who decides that Plato usually conceived of God as if personal, yet was restrained by a doctrine inconsistent with such conception from approaching it closely or setting it deliberately on any scientific ground,” and devotes several closely-reasoned pages to show that, although there was no room for a personal god in Plato’s philosophy, Plato himself was in distinct opposition to his own views as systematically expounded in his writings. “We may regard him as fully aware of the conditions of the problem, and, though unable to solve it without lesion of his dialectic, yet deliberately pronouncing judgment on the side of his religious feeling.” But _pace tantorum virorum_ it will be admitted that the personality of God is not very evident in Plato when those who understand him best can only maintain that it is not essentially interwoven with his philosophy, having only an indirect and accidental existence which is not possible “without lesion of his dialectic.”