falsehood of the faith of their fathers, the spirit of scorn and reverence which rejected all belief in a Divine Order, and made its own desires the standard of duty, and its own conceptions the measure of the universe, was an infinitely greater evil. To exclude from among the elements of tragedy the feeling of perplexity, mounting up to fierceness and despair, which rises out of seeing or feeling the moral disorders of the world, and which finds utterance even in the psalms of Asaph and the confessions of the Preacher, and yet more awfully in the impassioned complaints of Job, would have been to cast away the most effective instrument for acting upon the feelings of man-
than anything in the extant dramas to his work as a preacher of the truth. "Listen also," so he speaks to his heathen readers, "if we may bring a quotation from the stage in support of the unity of God, to what was said by Sophocles:—
Who made the heaven, and all the vast of earth,
The exulting sea, and all the strength of winds;
But we, poor mortals, wandering in our hearts,
Set up poor cheats to soothe our soul's distress,
Carved images of God in wood and stone,
Or forms of well-wrought gold, or ivory,
And, offering sacrifice to these with rites
And solemn feasts, we think we worship Him.'"—
Justin M., Cohort. in Græc. p. 19.
It must be confessed that the passage has somewhat of an apocryphal savour, like that of the Sibylline verses that accompany it. It is quoted, however, by Clement of Alexandria (Protreptic, vii., p. 21) with equal confidence, and is admitted by Eusebius into his Præparatio Evangelica, (xiii., p. 680.) It is interesting to compare it with another attempt to put the language of Monotheism into the mouths of the poets and philosophers, the noble hymn on the unity of the Godhead, which comes at the end of the De Mundo of the Pseudo-Aristotle.
