Page:Tragedies of Sophocles (Plumptre 1878).djvu/81

Rh 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