found that his only possibility of right action lay in a crime. He was
bound to avenge his father, the god Apollo had enjoined it; and the
avenging of his father meant the murder of his mother. What he commits,
then, is a crime, but not a sin; and so it is regarded by the poet. The
tragedy, as we have said, centres round an external objective law--
"blood calls for blood." But that is all. Of the internal drama of the
soul with God, the division of the man against himself, the remorse, the
repentance, the new birth, the giving or withholding of grace--of all
this, the essential content of Christian Protestantism, not a trace in
the clear and concrete vision of the Greek. The profoundest of the poets
of Hellas, dealing with the darkest problem of guilt, is true to the
plastic genius of his race. The spirit throws outside itself the law of
its own being; by objective external evidence it learns that doing
involves suffering; and its moral conviction comes to it only when
forced upon it from without by a direct experience of physical evil. Of
Aeschylus, the most Hebraic of the Hellenes, it is as true as of the
average Greek, that in the Puritan meaning of the phrase he had no sense
of sin. And even in treating of him, we must still repeat what we said
at the beginning, that the Greek conception of the relation of man to
the gods is external and mechanical, not inward and spiritual.


Section 10. Mysticism.

But there is nothing so misleading as generalisation, specially on the
subject of the Greeks. Again and again when we think we have laid hold
of their characteristic view we are confronted with some new aspect of
their life which we cannot fit into harmony with our scheme. There is no
formula which will sum up that versatile and many-sided people. And so,
in the case before us, we have no sooner made what appears to be the