And my ending is despair
Unless I be relieved by prayer,
Which pierces so that it assaults
Mercy itself, and frees all faults.
No poet has dwelt more on the duty and moral efficacy of prayer, on the omnipresence of God, and on the fact that in conscience we have a Divine monitor.
Of the respect which Shakespeare entertained for Christianity as a creed, of his conviction of its competency to fulfil and satisfy all the ends of religion in men of the highest type of intelligence and ability, we require no further proof than his Henry V. Henry V. is undoubtedly his ideal man, as Theseus in the Œdipus Coloneus is the ideal man of Sophocles. And Henry V. is pre-eminently a Christian. Wherever Shakespeare refers to the person and to the teachings of Christ, it is always with peculiar tenderness and solemnity. His ethics are in one respect essentially Christian, and that is in their emphatic insistence on the virtues of mercy and forgiveness of injuries. In Measure for Measure, he stretched the first as far as the Master Himself stretched it, at the eleventh hour, to the penitent thief. And in the Tempest, that play which seems to embody in allegory Shakespeare's mature and final philosophy of life, who does not recognise the symbol of Him who rules, not merely in justice and righteousness, but in benevolence and mercy, when Prospero, with sinners and traitors and foes in his power, proclaims—
The rarer action is
In virtue than in vengeance: they being penitent,
The sole drift of my purpose doth extend
Not a frown further.