cussing—the unknown future of the soul; still, he argues, they should persevere in the search for truth, taking the best of human words to bear them up "as on a raft" through the stormy waters of life; but their voyage on this frail bark would be perilous, unless they might hope to meet with some securer stay—some "word from God," it might be.
Passages of this sort explain sufficiently the grounds of the reverence with which Plato was regarded by the Eastern Church, and especially in the school for catechists at Alexandria, where Clement and Origen taught. They even go far to justify the belief of Augustine that Plato might perhaps have listened to Jeremiah in Egypt, and that in his esoteric lectures in the Academy he revealed the mystery of the Trinity to a few chosen disciples.
Tertullian, on the other hand, declaimed bitterly at Carthage against all Greek philosophy. He headed the reaction which had set in against the Gnostics of a former century, who had changed Plato's "Ideas" into a world of Æons, and held that the Word, Wisdom, and Power, were so many emanations from the divine mind. Platonism Tertullian held to be the source of all heresies, and denied that there could be any fellowship between the disciple of Greece and the disciple of heaven, or between the Church and the Academy.
Boethius, as we have said, was the last Neo-Platonist; and his "Consolations of Philosophy" is the link between the old world and the new. Then came the Dark Ages, when the classics were only read by monks
