This is our ministry marked for us from the beginning;
This is our gift, and our portion apart, and our godhead,
Ours, ours only for ever,
Darkness, robes of darkness, a robe of terror for ever!
Ruin is ours, ruin and wreck;
When to the home
Murder hath come,
Making to cease
Innocent peace;
Then at his beck
Follow we in,
Follow the sin;
And ah! we hold to the end when we begin!"
[Footnote: Aeschyl. Eum. 297.--Translated by Dr. Verrall
(Cambridge, 1885).]

There is no poetry more sublime than this; none more penetrated with the
sense of moral law. But still it is wholly Greek in character. The theme
is not really the conscience of the sinner but the objective consequence
of his crime. "Blood calls for blood," is the poet's text; a man, he
says, must pay for what he does. The tragedy is the punishment of the
guilty, not his inward sense of sin. Orestes, in fact, who is the
subject of the drama with which we are concerned, in a sense was not a
sinner at all. He had killed his mother, it is true, but only to avenge
his father whom she had murdered, and at the express bidding of Apollo.
So far is he from feeling the pangs of conscience that he constantly
justifies his act. He suffers, not because he has sinned but because he
is involved in the curse of his race. For generations back the house of
Atreus had been tainted with blood; murder had called for murder to
avenge it; and Orestes, the last descendant, caught in the net of guilt,