for discussions in which the true principles of all morality are questioned, and not asserted, does in effect contribute to undermine men's reverence for them, and is so far an element of evil in the literature of his time and country.[1]
What is characteristic of the poetry of Sophocles is the absence of this half rhetorical sophistry, the prominence of what is directly antagonistic to it. Nowhere, even in the ethics of Christian writers, are there nobler assertions of a morality divine, universal, unchangeable, of laws whose dwelling is on high,—
"In which our God is great, and changeth not,"
of which it is true that
"They are not of to-day or yesterday;"[2]
that they, written on the hearts of all men, are of prior obligation to all conventional arrangements of society, or the maxims of political expediency. Such as he was in relation to the Ethics of his time, such he was also in relation to what we may venture to speak of as its Theology. For him, indeed, there was
- ↑ It is to this moral elevation of tone that we may ascribe Aristotle's dictum (Poet., c. 25) that Sophocles drew men as they ought to be, Euripides as they actually were. It is not that the characters of the former are all good, but that there is nothing mean and corrupting in their faults. The nearest approach to any such phase of character in Sophocles is found in the speeches of Odysseus in the Philoctetes, (100–120, 1049–1052;) but he is there so manifestly the foil to the higher character of Neoptolemos, falling, at the close of the play, not without some shame, into the background, that we feel at once that the purpose of the whole tragedy was to condemn, instead of asserting, the doctrine that the end justifies the means.
- ↑ Œd. King, 863–871. Antig., 450–457.
