daily contact with the fashionable sophists—this schooling had shown him all the flaws of the common creeds, had furnished him with keen weapons to assail them, nay, had supplied the basis of a larger and purer faith, in which one great Intelligence controlled all matter, and supplanted the crowd of conflicting gods by physical agencies. Yet though all these things are constantly suggested in his plays, he never breaks outright with orthodoxy. He brings the gods upon his stage as frequently as his rivals did, he makes them intervene in human affairs, nor does he always purify the myths by justifying or modifying the divine interferences. He even declares, in more than one weighty passage, the idleness of theological speculation, and the duty of a modest submission to the received faith. The only declared atheist in his extant plays is the brutal and ignorant Cyclops, whose coarse and sensual unbelief is surely intended for a keen satire on such vulgarity in speculation.
21. Thus again in morals, all the violences of passion, all the coldness of self-love, seem palliated, nay, even justified by the cruelty and ruthlessness of Fate, which smites down the just and spares the unjust, which refuses a reward to self-sacrifice and devotion, which indulges the spendthrift and the libertine at the world's cost and damage. Nevertheless, though the gods seem unjust, if we accept their rule, and though there is no sanction or reward for good if we abolish their empire, yet the poet holds a deep moral conviction that all will yet be well, and that the delays in divine justice are no warrant for its denial.
These reservations are, indeed, but rare streaks of light amid the storms of passion and the gloom of doubt which occupy his stage. He felt that the great world problems needed some new solution; that the nature of man did not correspond with his supposed destiny; that in the decay of society and of morals, by reason of long and barbarous wars, the optimists were playing the game into their adversaries' hands, and that scepticism or nihilism was the natural consequence of an enforced
