Page:Tragedies of Sophocles (Plumptre 1878).djvu/96

xciv spirit of a wise conservatism, at bringing into permanent harmony the two principles of order and of progress, reverence for the past, and freedom and hopefulness for the future. In his estimate of the higher and more mysterious truths which enter into man's life and thoughts, he stands, as we have seen, on a far higher elevation. The work of Homer was to immortalise the poorest and coarsest forms of the popular mythology, with scarcely a thought of anything beyond them or above them. In the transition stage, of which he is the representative, the grandeur of the physical conceptions, out of which the Polytheism of Greece arose, was all but lost, and that of the loftier ethical thoughts of a true anthropopathy hardly as yet in sight. The work of Sophocles, following, though with calmer tread, and clearer vision, and serener speech, in the steps of Æschylos, was the task, finding the mythology of Homer in possession of the mind of the people, to turn it, as far as it could be turned, into an instrument of moral education, and to lead men upwards to the eternal laws of God, and the thought of His righteous order. If, in the language so familiar to the noblest minds of early Christendom, we may recognise in Greek philosophy an education by which men were prepared for