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lxxvi 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.

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,—

of which it is true that

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