Page:The Book of the Homeless (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1916).djvu/245

 In later times Lucretius was to take up this thought, and in repeating the story of Iphigenia was to denounce the very notion of divine interference in perhaps the most terrible line that ever poet wrote:

That is one way of regarding the evils of human destiny, as if they were the work of blind chance, but not the wise way; for at the end of such atheism only madness lies. The truer counsel is in that humility which faces the facts, yet acknowledges the impotence of man's reason to act as judge in these high matters. Christianity and paganism come close together in the lesson taught by Euripides:

O daughter, God is strange and all his ways Past finding out. So for his own good will He turns the fortunes of mankind about, And hither thither moves.

That is the element of religious purgation which Euripides brought to the people of Athens when their whole horizon was darkened by war. But this is not all. Indeed, were this all, we should reject such consolation indignantly, as being akin to that form of humanitarianism which has been disintegrating modern society by throwing the responsibility for crime anywhere except on the individual delinquent. Euripides may have found alleviation in the universal mystery of evil, but neither he, in his better moments, nor any other of the true Greeks turned consolation into license, or doubted that a sure nemesis followed the infractions of justice, or the insolence of pride, or the errors of guilty ignorance:

Strong are the gods, and stronger yet the law That sways them; even as by the law we know The gods exist, and in our life divide The bounds of right and wrong.

The madness of Troy and the Achaean army may have been the work of heaven, but no small part of Greek tragedy, from the Agamemnon of