269 INTRODUCTION TO THE TREATISE THAT NO ONE CAN HARM THE MAN WHO DOES NOT INJURE HIMSELF. This very beautiful treatise was composed when St. Chrysostom was in exile, probably not long before his death, and was sent with a letter to his great friend the deaconess Olympias in Constantinople. Plato in the 10th book of his Dialogue called the “Republic” employs an argument to prove the immortality of the soul, so nearly resembling a portion of this treatise that I can scarcely doubt St. Chrysostom had it in his mind. The following is the passage in the Platonic dialogue as rendered in the excellent translation of Messrs. Davies & Vaughan. I omit a few sentences here and there. “Have you not learned, I asked, that our soul is immortal and never dies? He looked at me and said in amazement. No really I have not: but can you maintain this doctrine? Yes as I am an honest man, I replied, and I think you could also. It is quite easy to do it. Proceed by all means. So you call one thing good and another evil? I do. And do we hold the same opinion as to the meaning of two terms? What opinion do you hold? I hold that the term evil comprises everything that destroys and corrupts, and the term good everything that preserves and benefits. So do I. Again; do you maintain that everything has its evil and its good? Do you say for example that the eyes are liable to the evil of ophthalmia, the entire body to disease, corn to mildew, timber to rot, copper and iron to rust or in other words that almost everything is liable to some connatural evil and malady? I do. And is it not the case that, whenever an object is attacked by one of these maladies it is impaired; and in the end completely broken up and destroyed by it? Doubtless it is so? Hence everything is destroyed by its own connatural evil and vice: otherwise if it be not destroyed by this, there is nothing else that can corrupt it. For that which is good will never destroy anything, nor yet that which is neither good nor evil. Of course not. If then we can find among existing things one which is liable to a particular evil which can indeed mar it, but cannot break it up or destroy it, shall we not be at once certain that a thing so constituted can never perish? Introduction. 369 Introduction.