“..... to unfold
What worlds and what vast regions hold
The immortal mind that hath forsook
Her mansion in this fleshy nook”;

—­no, but he must think of all times coming; and how, whenever there should be any restlessness against the tyranny of materialism and dogma, a cry should go up for Plato.—­So let Isocrates, the ’old man eloquent,’—­let a many-worded not unpeculant patriotic Demosthenes who knew nothing of the God-world—­attend to an Athens wherein the Gods were no longer greatly interested;—­the great Star Plato should rise up into mid-heaven, and shine not in, but high over Athens and quite apart from her; drawing from her indeed the external elements of his culture, but the light and substance from that which was potent in her no longer.

I said Greece served the future badly enough.  Consider what might have been.  The pivot of the Mediterranean world, in the sixth century, was not Athens, but in Magna Graecia:  at Croton, where Pythagoras had built his school.  But the mob wrecked Croton, and smashed the Pythagorean Movement as an organization; and that, I take it, and one other which we shall come to in time, were the most disastrous happenings in European history.  Yes; the causes why Classical civilization went down; why the Dark Ages were dark; why the God in Man his been dethroned, and suffered all this crucifixion and ignominy the last two thousand years.  Aeschylus, truly, received some needed backing from the relics of the Movement which he found still existent in Sicily; but what might he not have written, and what of his writings might not have come down to us, preserved there in the archives, had he had the peace and elevation of a Croton, organized, to retire to?  Whither, too, Socrates might have gone, and not to death, when Athens became impossible; where Plato might have dwelt and taught; revealing, to disciples already well-trained, much more than ever he did reveal; and engraving, oh so deeply! on the stuff of time, the truths that make men free.  And there he should have had successors and successors and successors; a line to last perhaps a thousand or two thousand years; who never should have let European humanity forget such simple facts as Karma and Reincarnation.  But only at certain times are such great possibilities presented to mankind; and a seed-time once passed, there can be no sowing again until the next season comes.  It is no good arguing with the Law of Cycles.  Plato may not have been less than Pythagoras; yet, under the Law, he might not attempt—­ it would have been folly for him to have attempted—­that which Pythagoras had attempted.  So he had to take another line altogether; to choose another method; not to try to prevent the deluge, which was certain now to come; not even to build an ark, in which something should be saved; but, so to say, to strew the world with tokens which, when the great waters had subsided, should still remain to remind men of those things it is of most importance they should know.