INTRODUCTION
Hellenistic world escaping from the conflict of constitutions and systems of law by the deification of Alexander and his successors, and cutting its juridical knots by the legal fiction of the divine will. Nay, even before Aeschylus set to work upon it, the same conception was really implicit in the anthropomorphism of the classical Olympian religion. As I have tried to show elsewhere,[1] the great advance made by that system as compared with the welter of primitive tabus and terrors which it tried, however artificially and inadequately, to supersede, lies in this same humanizing of the non-human. It brought to man the Good News that, as Plutarch expresses it, "the world is not ruled by fabulous Typhons and Giants"—nor, we may add, by blind mechanical laws—"but by One who is a wise Father to all." It sought to make religion humane at the expense of making it anthropomorphic.
It is more interesting still to realize that the Aeschylean doctrine is in essence an early and less elaborate stage of the theological system which we associate with St. Paul: the suppression of the Law by a personal relation to a divine person, and a consequent disregard for the crude coarse test of a man's "works" or "deeds" in comparison with the one unfailing test of the spirit, its "faith" or "faithfulness" towards God. Aeschylus would have understood Paul's exhortation to escape beyond the "beggarly elements" to Him who made them, beyond the Creation to the Creator; and Paul would have understood Aeschylus' insistence on the forgiveness of the sup-
- ↑ Five Stages of Greek Religion, Chapter II.
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