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396 Plato is recommended in the Ratio as one of the authors for Rhetoric class; in modern Jesuit colleges Plato is mostly read in Freshman class, for which he is an excellent author. In the words of a Jesuit critic, "Greek philosophy is one of the choicest fruits of Greek culture which, together with Greek poetry, history and oratory, was destined to form the basis of the culture of the Western nations." Plato, one of the greatest thinkers of all ages, vaguely felt and presaged some of the grand religious and moral truths which were to be clearly revealed by Christ. Thus he became the παιςαγωγὀς είς Χριστόν. No philosopher, in fact no writer of antiquity, exerted a greater influence on the early Christian writers. His many errors, mixed with some Christian truth, gave rise to numerous heresies in the earlier centuries, and misled even gigantic intellects like that of Origen. On the other hand, as Father Baumgartner observes, "numerous minds, searching after truth, have through his writings been raised out of the depths of materialism to the purer heights of idealistic speculations."

In Plato, there is, in the words of his disciple Aristotle, "a middle species of diction, between prose and verse," and Cicero said: "If Jupiter were to speak in the Greek tongue, he would use the language of Plato." Some of his dialogues are so sublime, so harmonious, so rhythmical, that they may truly be