Unsullied to maintain,
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 oedipus, 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: "oedipus Tyran.," pp. 863-872.]

[Footnote 208: Pressense, "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been fulfilled by Heathenism which, at least, repealed the _want_, and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.

[Footnote 209: The practice, so common with some theological writers, of
drawing dark pictures of heathenism, in which not one luminous spot is
visible, in order to exalt the revelations given to the Jews, is
exceedingly unfortunate, and highly reprehensible. It is unfortunate,
because the skeptical scholar knows that there were some elements of
truth and excellence, and even of grandeur, in the religion and
civilization of the republics of Greece and Rome; and it is
reprehensible, because it is a one-sided and unjust procedure, in so far
as it withholds part of the truth. This species of argument is a
two-edged sword which cuts both ways. The prevalence of murder, and
slavery, and treachery, and polygamy, in Greece and Rome, is no more a