the same melodious choral songs, the same large stage, with architectural scenery half-open to the sky, and, above all, the same intensity of religious feeling, which thrills the actor, and passes from him, like an electric current, to an enthusiastic audience. And if this resemblance is apparent now, how much stronger must it have been in the middle ages, when the Bible was a sealed book to the poorer classes, while the Passion-Play embodied for them to the life the personages and scenes of Scripture—when, as a German critic describes it, "cloister and church were the first theatres, priests the first actors, the first dramatic matter was the Passion, and the first dramas the Mysteries."[1]
Sophocles developed this religious aspect of the drama; and no Athenian citizen could have seen his 'Ajax' or 'Antigone' without feeling their hearts burn within them, or without being touched and elevated by the mingled sweetness and purity and pathos which earned for the poet the title of the "Attic Bee." From his pages can be gleaned sentences which read like fragments from the inspired writings, and which might have furnished texts for a hundred sermons, With him the Deity is a personal and omnipresent being, far removed from that sombre and vindictive Nemesis which haunted Æschylus,—"neither sleeping nor waxing faint in the lapse of years, but reigning for ever in the splendour of Olympus,"—"speaking in riddles to the wise, but leaving the foolish in their own conceits.""Nothing is impossible with Him""His works may perish, but He lives for all eter-
