Page:Tragedies of Sophocles (Plumptre 1878).djvu/79

Rh a veil over the central truth. He lived surrounded by all forms of the mythical religion with which the activity of Greek imagination had clothed itself, and, in the absence of a higher knowledge, he could but accept them as symbols and exponents of the Truth. It was unwise to lessen men's reverence for them, unless he had something better to offer in their stead. In his own case, indeed, the acceptance was probably (as it was with Herodotos, and, perhaps, with Pericles himself) that of a mind which had received, and had not dared to question,—utterly unlike the scepticism of a later age, which kept up the show of conformity as a state necessity, or that which, in Rousseau's Confession of the Savoyard Vicar, is represented as compatible with the maintenance of a corrupt Christianity. There are no tokens of any consciousness of a contradiction between the higher and lower forms of Greek religion. The very fact that he had a firm grasp on the truths of the one, made him tolerant, or more than tolerant, of the other. All that we can note as characteristic in his way of dealing with the popular religion is, that here also there is a kind of instinctive reverence and purity. The baser elements of it fall into the background. The impurities which were found elsewhere, are to him as though they were not. The gods of Sophocles are not, like those of Homer, spiteful, vindictive, mean, below the level of heroic, or even of average human worth. They are not,