'All vainly I reverenced God, and in vain unto man was I just."

Here Euripides carries perhaps to its most tremendous expression in pagan literature a thought which, as observed by Dr. Adam, is a chief element in the melancholy of Greek poetry. The arraignment of Hippolytus is of the gods of mythology, and belongs to the Greek situation, yet his complaint has a ring that makes it akin to that of Job.

It is interesting to note in this connexion that in Greek philosophy the two chief solutions towards one or other of which the attempts of pure metaphysics to deal with this problem have tended have already their statement in the philosophies of Heraclitus and of Plato. That of Heraclitus, who seems to have been primarily a metaphysician, is the one that modern philosophy has found most attractive.

'For God accomplishes all things with a view to the harmony of the whole, dispensing what is expedient thereunto, even as Heraclitus says that to God all things are beautiful and good and right, but men consider some things wrong and others right."2

In this sentence we have the essence of that conception of Spinoza's which has exercised so great a fascination for modern speculation in philosophy and poetry. The solution which seems to be Plato's, although he is less clear (being unable perhaps to find a solution which was entirely satisfactory to both his metaphysical and his moral standpoint), is a kind of dualism which has been a great source of perplexity to students. It is especially a stumblingblock to those who identify 'the Good' of Plato with God; for a world of which all the reality is in the Ideas, if these are dominated by one Supreme Idea, must give us Monism; but God is not the author of the evil in the world, as we are told in the Republic and the Timaeus. This can perhaps be avoided by a view that the evil is only phenomenal; but such a view introduces a grave inconsistency into the Theory of Ideas, which cannot in strictness allow phenomena 1 Eur. Hippolytus, 1366 (tr. Way). Fragment 61 (Burnet).

of which there are no ideas. Nor does this seem to be the meaning of the doctrine in the Timaeus of a Necessity which concurred with Reason in the generation of the universe, and seems to be assigned a positive existence.

To return to the consideration of the religious-moral problem in Aeschylus and Sophocles: any critical study, such as that of Dr. Adam, must convince us in the first place of the growth in the people of a need for the moral guidance of religion, and in the second place of the work of these two poets in supplying the ideals, or moulding the popular mythology into the ideal forms that were demanded. Aeschylus and Sophocles are, although Plato does not seem to have realized or acknowledged it, great, if not the greatest, examples of the possibilities of poetry as national education. For the best teacher speaks in the language the people can best understand, and that through their emotions as well as their intellect. Philosophically estimated indeed they stand for a compromise which Plato could not accept, at least at the period of the Republic; and had their work been expressed in philosophical form it would have to be admitted that it came too late. Euripides from this point of view more truly heralds the new age, and belongs to the future of the world. But for the majority in their own generation they did more than philosophy could do, and thus prepared it unconsciously for further religious develop

ments.

They infused into the old, familiar legends, even into what were for Euripides' the minstrel's sorry tales,' all the best meaning of the new religious and moral ideas and aspirations which were in the spiritual atmosphere of the time but not crystallized. The higher notions of justice and mercy which political and civil progress engendered, the mysticism which came with longer history, bringing longer thoughts, with contact with other nations, and practice in Eleusinian and Orphic ceremonies, the deepening moral sense which tortures the mind with consciousness of sin, these were breathed by these poets into the forms that the people best knew, the legends of great families with the burden of hereditary crime, the sombre super

stition of a destiny or divine power that helped to make the wrong and woe unending. Thus the new teaching needed seemed to grow from those roots which were too deep in the soil out of which national character sprang to be removed.

In connexion with the relation of the tragic drama to the general mind a study of the place held in Athenian life by the Eleusinian mysteries at this period would be of great interest. If Dr. Adam had been able to include such a study in the scope of his Gifford Lectures further light would no doubt have been thrown by him on the question how far the ordinary religious consciousness had felt its way to the conception which was for the contemporary Hebrew the A B C of spiritual thought, viz. that the highest morality is perfected by religion. For these mysteries seem to have been at the time of the culmination of Attic power, and of creativeness both in art and in the life of citizenship, the mode of religious exercise to which the State devoted most interest and care-the religious festival of the Athenians which indeed they wished to make nationally Greek. Dr. Farnell brings out the evidence which exists for regarding the celebration of the Eleusinian mysteries as a moralizing influence for the Greeks. The fifth century B.C.,' he writes, 'was ripe for that momentous development in religion whereby the conception of ritualistic purity becomes an ethical conception. Aristophanes, Pindar, &c., bear testimony that on the whole the performance of the Eleusinian mysteries had an elevating effect on conduct.' Dr. Adam's preference for the Orphic mysteries, to which he devotes a chapter, is due of course to the influence of Orphism upon Plato, who in spite of contempt for some of the Orphic teaching and practices shews a sympathy, conscious or unconscious, with its doctrines in his religious speculation.

1

On the whole subject of the relation of religious motive to conduct evidence which might be drawn from the historians would also be of value; but this branch of Greek literature was inevitably outside Dr. Adam's range 1 Cults of the Greek States, vol. iv. chap. ii.

and aim in his work, since the historians are teachers.

1

Professor Campbell in his Religion in Greek Literature has an interesting chapter on Herodotus; and, as Rawlinson points out, the attitude of mind shewn in Herodotus' ready acceptance of oracles, prodigies, &c., has the advantage of ' inducing him to place on record a whole class of motives and feelings which did in point of fact largely influence the conduct of his countrymen.' The religious enthusiasm of the temper in which the people entered upon the Persian War is hardly anywhere more finely suggested than in Herodotus' story of the vision on the eve of Salamis of Dicaeus the Athenian and Demaratus the Spartan, who saw a cloud as of the dust of thousands moving in the Eleusinian procession from deserted Athens to desecrated Delphi. In the case of Thucydides the historian's lack of interest in the religious motive, as shewn in its comparative absence from most of the speeches (except for perfunctory references), and especially from the great apology for Athens, Pericles' Funeral Oration, is an argument that we may attach all the greater weight to the instances in which is found that 'Reverence for the Divine' which cannot be kept out of the general narrative. Of this the supreme instance is the fatal delay of the Athenians in their last extremity at Syracuse on account of the eclipse of the moon, for the mass of the army was greatly moved, and Nicias was too much influenced by divinations and omens." The general tone of the instances of the religious or, more strictly, superstitious motives given by both historians is manifestly non-moral. So far as Herodotus and Thucydides are concerned the preparation for a moral religion seems to be found in that spirit of patriotism which had a deeper meaning for the Greeks in the solitude of their civilization than has been the case probably for any other people. It is possible that something was added to the strength of this by the inadequacy to national needs of the ideals actually furnished by religion. Of this quality in civic 1 History of Herodotus, vol. i. Introduction. * δεισιδαιμονία.

Thucydides, History, lib. vii.

patriotism the Funeral Speech of Pericles is the most intellectual expression, as Herodotus' account of Thermopylae is the most pathetic. It seems that all the evidence of literature is in favour of the view that Plato and the other religious teachers of Greece were not addressing a people in whom the religious instinct was dim.

IV.

A consideration of Plato's attack on poetry will perhaps help to make clearer the position of religious thought in Athens at his time, as well as Plato's own spiritual standpoint in history, 'between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born.' Dr. Adam, since he is considering the answer of the Greek poets and thinkers to the eternal spiritual problems,' devotes his first lecture to a discussion of the relations between poetry and philosophy. He is led also to this beginning by the commanding interest of Plato. To write of Plato was for him a labour of love. Whatsoever (or one-third of what) is good in me put down to Neil, one-sixth to, and the rest to Plato,' he says in a letter quoted in the memoir prefixed to his Lectures. It is also the result of a reasoned conviction. Of course he' (Plato) 'knocks all the others into a cocked hat; there is no one like him, none. It is tremendous how he searches all the depths of one's whole nature. You really must devote a year or two to the exclusive study of his work, if you mean to do anything useful for the interpretation of religious thought.'

2

With regard to the question between poetry and philosophy for Plato, the issue is perhaps even deeper than that upon which Dr. Adam mainly dwells. The ancient quarrel between poetry and philosophy,' in order to be taken as more than ironical ground for the force of his condemnation, must be indeed interpreted as religious and ethical in its quality. According to Dr. Adam it was because the conceptions of Greek mythology were endowed by the genius of Homer with a living and overmastering sway over the 1 Op. cit. Introduction.

2 Letter to Mr. T. R. Glover, August 1904.