save by report," an audacity which evoked a great uproar. In a later production the passage was prudently altered; [625] but he never put much check on his native tendency to analyse and criticize on all issues--a tendency fostered, as we have seen, [626] by the constant example of real and poignant dialectic in the Athenian dikastery, and the whole drift of the Athenian stage. In his case the tendency even overbalances the artistic process; [627] but it has the advantage of involving a very bold handling of vital problems. Not satisfied with a merely dramatic presentment of lawless Gods, Euripides makes his characters impeach them as such, [628] or, again, declare that there can be no truth in the "miserable tales of poets" which so represent them. [629] Not content with putting aside as idle such a fable as that of the sun's swerving from his course in horror at the crime of Atreus, [630] and that of the Judgment of Paris, [631] he attacks with a stringent scorn the whole apparatus of oracles, divination, and soothsaying. [632] And if the Athenian populace cried out at the hardy opening of the Melanippe, he nonetheless gave them again and again his opinion that no man knew anything of the Gods. [633] Of orthodox protests against freethinking inquiry he gives a plainly ironical handling. [634] As regards his constructive opinions, we have from him many expressions of the pantheism which had by his time permeated the thought of perhaps most of the educated Greeks. [635] Here again, as in the case of Æschylus, there arises the problem of contradiction; for Euripides, too, puts often in the mouths of his characters emphatic expressions of customary piety. The conclusion in the two cases must be broadly the same--that whereas an unbelieving dramatist may well make his characters talk in the ordinary way of deity and of religion, it is unintelligible that a believing one should either go beyond the artistic bounds of his task to make them utter an unbelief which must have struck the average listener as strange and noxious, or construct a drama of which the whole effect is to insist on the odiousness of the action of the Supreme God. And the real drift of Euripides is so plain that one modern and Christian scholar has denounced him as an obnoxious and unbelieving sophist who abused his opportunity as a producer of dramas under religious auspices to "shake the ground-works of religion" [636] and at the same time of morals; [637] while another and a greater scholar, less vehement in his orthodoxy, more restrainedly condemns the dramatist for employing myths in which he did not believe, instead of inventing fresh plots. [638] Christian scholars are thus duly unready to give him credit for his many-sided humanity, nobly illustrated in his pleas for the slave and his sympathy with suffering barbarians. [639] Latterly the recognition of Euripides's freethinking has led to the description of him as