Of the respect which Shakespeare entertained for Christianity as a creed, of his conviction of its competency to fulfil and satisfy all the ends of religion in men of the highest type of intelligence and ability, we require no further proof than his Henry V. Henry V. is undoubtedly his ideal man, as Theseus in the _Œdipus Coloneus_ is the ideal man of Sophocles. And Henry V. is pre-eminently a Christian. Wherever Shakespeare refers to the person and to the teachings of Christ, it is always with peculiar tenderness and solemnity. His ethics are in one respect essentially Christian, and that is in their emphatic insistence on the virtues of mercy and forgiveness of injuries. In _Measure for Measure_, he stretched the first as far as the Master Himself stretched it, at the eleventh hour, to the penitent thief. And in the _Tempest_, that play which seems to embody in allegory Shakespeare’s mature and final philosophy of life, who does not recognise the symbol of Him who rules, not merely in justice and righteousness, but in benevolence and mercy, when Prospero, with sinners and traitors and foes in his power, proclaims-- The rarer action is In virtue than in vengeance: they being penitent, The sole drift of my purpose doth extend Not a frown further. He struck this note in one of the earliest of his plays:-- Who by repentance is not satisfied, Is nor of heaven, nor earth: for these are pleas’d. By penitence th’ Eternal’s wrath’s appeas’d.[57] and the note vibrates through his works. It is the crowning moral of _Measure for Measure_; it is one of the dominant notes in _Cymbeline_. He also reflects Christianity in the beautiful optimism which discerns in evil the agent of good, and in calamity and sorrow the benevolence and mercy of God. This is the philosophy which penetrates what were probably his last three dramas, _The Winter’s Tale_, _Cymbeline_, and _The Tempest_. In these respects, then, it may fairly be maintained that Shakespeare is Christian. For the rest his dramas might, so far as their philosophy is concerned, have come down to us from classical antiquity. Nothing can be more Greek than the main basis on which his ethics rest--the observance of the mean, and the recognition of the relation of virtue to the becoming. When Claudio says:-- As surfeit is the father of much fast, So every scope by the immoderate use Turns to restraint; when Norfolk says:-- The fire that mounts the liquor till ’t o’erflow In seeming to augment it wastes it; when Friar Laurence tells us that:-- Virtue itself turns vice, being misapplied, And vice sometime ’s by action dignified; and Portia that There is no good without respect,