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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Ion by Plato: of poets, and uses them as his ministers, as he also uses diviners and holy
prophets, in order that we who hear them may know them to be speaking not
of themselves who utter these priceless words in a state of
unconsciousness, but that God himself is the speaker, and that through them
he is conversing with us. And Tynnichus the Chalcidian affords a striking
instance of what I am saying: he wrote nothing that any one would care to
remember but the famous paean which is in every one's mouth, one of the
finest poems ever written, simply an invention of the Muses, as he himself
says. For in this way the God would seem to indicate to us and not allow
us to doubt that these beautiful poems are not human, or the work of man,
but divine and the work of God; and that the poets are only the
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