puppets, whose conduct is determined by the action of forces wholly external.

But if we look within, there is the consciousness of responsibility, the sense of victory and defeat, the energy of opposition, which by its elasticity and continuance bears witness at least to the possibility of success,-in a word, the intuition of personality, which supplies a power not less strong than circumstance, by which we know that our life is a struggle and not an evolution of consequences, that if its purpose fails we are overcome.

Before our

And thus it is that Eschylus paints life. He sets fate by the side of will and lets them work. own eyes fate, or as we say circumstance, constantly prevails over infirmity if will, more rarely heroic will, recognises its work and achieves it.

A first sin is swelled by neglect to reckless infatuation; an inheritance of sorrow crushes the selfish sufferer who rejects the discipline of woe; a noble soul trustfully obeys the voice of divine warning, and wisdom is justified in the issue.

This is the teaching of Eschylus, and the teaching of natural experience. For us, indeed, the area of life is widened; the faint lights of an earthly government of God grow into the brightness of a kingdom of heaven; the strength of man is perfected by fellowship with a divine Redeemer; but none the less we can see in the Greek poet the outlines of the never-ending conflict of man with evil, and marvel at the invincible constancy with which he holds his faith in the sure supremacy of good, even when he looked upon the region beyond the grave as shrouded in dismal gloom, and felt the littleness of each single life.

Plato clothed in a Greek dress the common instincts of humanity; Æschylus works out a characteristically

He lived face to face with them, and they became axioms of life. For while he is a believer he is a poet and a prophet too. He looks beneath the manifold to the one: he translates, unconsciously it may be, the symbol into the lesson.

His work, as he seems to have understood it, was to reconcile and combine the conflicting factors of fate and will of which life is made up,—the offspring of earth and the offspring of heaven,—and not to ignore their antagonism, or suppress either element in the great battle.

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The passions and temptations with which he deals are of overwhelming magnitude; the situations which he plans are of terrible grandeur; the persons whom he exhibits are gigantic but yet there are present everywhere the two conflicting elements of fate and will out of which all action rises. The scale of representation is magnified, but the moral, when reduced to its simplest principles, is that of common experience. The life is human life, though the actors are heroes.

It is commonly said that the key to the moral understanding of the tragedies of Æschylus is the recognition of an inflexible fate by which families are doomed to destruction, without regard to the guilt or innocence of the victims. If this were true their highest value would be lost. But in fact the statement is as false to Eschylus as it is to life.

All life includes the element of fate and circumstance as well as the element of will and choice.

The traditions and beliefs in which we are reared, the memories which we inherit, the tendencies and impulses which go to form our character, the reputation in which we are held for the deeds of others who belong to us, all lie out of our power. If we allow our thoughts to rest on these only, we can conclude that we are mere

puppets, whose conduct 431 B.C.) His "Trojan Women " forces wholly external. year of the expedition to Sicily,

But if we look walcibiades (415 B.C.) He died in responsibility, the s Defore Egospotamos. He belonged of opposition, wh order which is represented by the age bears witness at nough he was only a generation younger word, the intuj3, his works, when compared with those of not less stro sor, represent the results of a revolution that our life and in thought.

sequences owever different Æschylus and Euripides are in And ews of existence, and in their treatment of life fate bythe stage, they are alike interesting to the student owne history of religious thought. Both speak with prev? personal feeling. Both offer a partial interpretation rec mysteries which fill them with an overwhelming awe. or both life with its infinite sorrows is greater than art.

In this respect they both differ from Sophocles, by tichom they are naturally separated. Sophocles is not S'he poet as prophet, but the poet as artist. For him all that is most solemn, or terrible, or beautiful in human experience becomes an element in his work. He shews the perfection of calm, conscious mastery over the subjects with which he deals, but he does not speak to us himself. He has no message, no questionings, no convictions, beyond such utterances as harmoniously. complete the consummate symmetry of his poems. It is otherwise with Eschylus and Euripides. Both are deeply moved, and shew that they are deeply moved, by religious feeling, as a spiritual and not an æsthetic force. But the feeling in the two cases is widely different.

Euripides is essentially a poet, and not a speculator. He deals with the mysteries of being from the side of feeling rather than of thought. A passionate fulness of human interest is the characteristic mark of his writings, and the secret of his power. He touched the common

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heart because he recognised the different phases of its ordinary sorrows and temptations and strivings. The brusque lines of Philemon are a unique testimony to his personal attractiveness:

If, as some say, men still in very truth

Had life and feeling after they are dead,
I had hanged myself to see Euripides.

The significance of Euripides as a religious teacher springs directly from his position and his character.

He looks from the midst of Athenian society, a society brilliant, restless, sanguine, superstitious, at the popular mythology, at life, at the future, with the keenest insight into all that belongs to man.

In order to understand the treatment of the popular mythology by Euripides, we must bear in mind the place which was occupied by the Homeric poems in contemporary Greek education. It is not too much to say that these were (if the phrase may be allowed) a kind of Greek Bible. Every Athenian was familiar with their contents; they furnished the general view of the relations of God and men, of the seen and the unseen, which formed a fixed background to the common prospect of life.

Euripides regarded the human and the divine as factors in life, alike real and permanent. He aimed at dealing with the whole sum of our present experience. He was therefore constrained to bring the popular creed in some way into harmony with absolute right and truth; to give a moral interpretation to current legends; to shew that life, even as we see it, offers ground for calm trust on which men may at least venture to rest.

He practically anticipates Browning's judgment that "little else is worth study than the incidents in the development of a soul."

Euripides takes account of the manifold fulness of human existence, but the whole effect of life, as he sees it, is, in its external aspect at least, clouded with great sorrow. There is no music to charm its grief. At the best it is chequered, like the face of the earth, with storm and sunshine

Not wholly happy, nor yet wholly sad,

Blest for a while, and then again unblest.

Man has a hard struggle to maintain, but he is able to maintain it. There is no ever-present, overwhelming weight of physical or moral necessity which crushes him. He is allowed from time to time to see that greater labours are the condition and the discipline of greater natures. And in spite of the obvious sorrows of life, he can discern that a divine purpose is being wrought out which will find accomplishment. "There is at present great confusion in the things of God and men." But the source of the disorder lies not with God but with man.

One chief cause of the sufferings and failures of men lies in the partial and inadequate view of the claims of being which is taken by those who are noble and good within a narrow range. This truth is brought out with impressive power in the characters of Pentheus and Hippolytus. Both are, up to a certain point, blameless and courageous, but they are unsympathetic to that which lies beyond their experience and inclination. They contemptuously cast aside warnings against selfwill. They refuse to pay respect to the convictions of others, or to admit that their view of life can fall short of fulness.

With tragic irony Pentheus is led to his ruin by a guilty curiosity, and Hippolytus, in the pathetic scene of his death, lays bare his overwhelming self-confidence. He can forgive his father, but he is defiant to the powers of heaven, and in the terrible line