r consummation only in
the 'Eumenides,' where the Erinyes themselves are appeased, and the
Furies become the gracious ones. This is not, however, without a special
divine interposition, and then only after a severe struggle between the
powers that cry for justice and those that plead for mercy."

The office and work which, in this trilogy, is assigned to Jove's son,
Apollo, must strike every reader as at least a remarkable resemblance,
if not a foreshadowing of the Christian doctrine of _reconciliation_.
"This becomes yet more striking when we bring into view the relation in
which this reconciling work stands to [Greek: Zeus Soter], Jupiter
Saviour--[Greek: Zeus tritos], Jupiter the third, who, in connection
with Apollo and Athena, consummates the reconciliation. Not only is
Apollo a [Greek: Soter], a Saviour, who, having himself been exiled from
heaven among men, will pity the poor and needy;[951] not only does
Athena sympathize with the defendant at her tribunal, and, uniting the
office of advocate and judge, persuade the avenging deities to be
appeased;[952] but Zeus is the beginning and end of the whole process.
Apollo appears as the advocate of Orestes only at her bidding;[953]
Athena inclines to the side of the accused, as the offspring of the
brain of Zeus, and of like mind with him."[954] Orestes, after his
acquittal, says that he obtained it

"By means of Pallas and of Loxias
And the third Saviour who doth all things sway."[955]

Platonism reveals a still closer affinity with Christianity in its
doctrine of sin, and its sense of the need of salvation. Plato is
sacredly jealous for the honor and purity of the divine character, and
rejects with indignation every hypothesis which would make God the
author of sin. "God, inasmuch as he is good, can not be the cause of all
things, as the common doctrine represents him to be. On the contrary, he
is the author of only a small part of human affairs; of the larger part
he is not the author; for our evil things far outnumber our good things.
The good things we must ascribe to God, whilst we must seek elsewhere,
and not in him, the causes of evil."[956] The doctrine of the poets,
which would in some way charge on the gods the errors of men, he sternly
resists. We must express our disapprobation of Homer, or any other poet,
if guilty of such foolish blunders about the gods as to tell us[957]

'Fast by the threshold of Jove's court are placed
Two ca