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| Chapter XXX
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Chapter XXX.
It seems to me also that the fancy of Plato, that those
stones which we call precious stones derive their lustre from a
reflection, as it were, of the stones in that better land, is taken
from the words of Isaiah in describing the city of God, “I will
make thy battlements of jasper, thy stones shall be crystal, and thy
borders of precious
stones;”4745
and, “I will
lay thy foundations with sapphires.” Those who hold in
greatest reverence the teaching of Plato, explain this myth of his as
an allegory. And the prophecies from which, as we conjecture,
Plato has borrowed, will be explained by those who, leading a godly
life like that of the prophets, devote all their time to the study of
the sacred Scriptures, to those who are qualified to learn by purity of
life, and their desire to advance in divine knowledge. For our
part, our purpose has been simply to say that what we affirm of that
sacred land has not been taken from Plato or any of the Greeks, but
that they rather—living as they did not only after Moses, who was
the oldest, but even after most of the prophets—borrowed from
them, and in so doing either misunderstood their obscure intimations on
such subjects, or else endeavoured, in their allusions to the better
land, to imitate those portions of Scripture which had fallen into
their hands. Haggai expressly makes a distinction between the
earth and the dry land, meaning by the latter the land in which we
live. He says: “Yet once, and I will shake the
heavens, and the earth, and the dry land, and the sea.”4746
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