In act and word, with awe divine,
What potent laws ordain.
"Laws spring from purer realms above:
Their father is the Olympian Jove.
Ne'er shall oblivion veil their front sublime,
Th' indwelling god is great, nor fears the wastes of time." [207]
The religious inspiration that animates Sophocles breaks out with incomparable beauty in the last words of Œdipus, when the old banished king sees through the darkness of death a mysterious light dawn, which illumines his blind eyes, and which brings to him the assurance of a blessed immortality. [208]
[Footnote 207: ][ (return) ] "Œdipus Tyran.," pp. 863-872.
[Footnote 208: ][ (return) ] Pressensé, "Religion before Christ," pp. 85-87.
Such a theology could not have been utterly powerless. The influence of truth, in every measure and degree, must be salutary, and especially of truth in relation to God, to duty, and to immortality. The religion of the Athenians must have had some wholesome and conserving influence of the social and political life of Athens. [209] Those who resign the government of this lower world almost exclusively to Satan, may see, in the religion of the Greeks, a simple creation of Satanic powers. But he who believes that the entire progress of humanity has been under the control and direction of a benignant Providence, must suppose that, in the purposes of God, even Ethnicism has fulfilled some end, or it would not have been permitted to live. God has "never left himself without a witness" in any nation under heaven. And some preparatory office has been fulfilled by Heathenism which, at least, repealed the want, and prepared the mind for, the advent of Christianity.