spectator, it is true, if not of all time, yet of all existence; his eyes will shrink from nothing, but his heart is not to be reft from him. He must prove all things, but hold fast only that which is good—a moral being, not the slave of sound and colour. In this drama, where Euripides seems to voice like some pagan archangel the glory of a non-moral absorption in the torrent of raw life, he is fundamentally as moral as at any moment in life. As Tannhäuser after his sojourn in the Venusberg is at length won back by the urgency of his own soul into the Roman Church, so does Euripides unflinchingly present, to an audience still breathing hard after the glories of Cithæron, Agave and Cadmus bowed over Pentheus’ mangled body, and the rejection of a god whose unmitigated demands imply the wreckage of sound human life. What, then, are we to believe of Dionysus? If we refuse him we are liable like Pentheus to be destroyed; if we surrender ourselves, what of Agave? Here is a dilemma which Euripides himself did not foresee. By θεός (“god”) he often means something widely different from the concept of an ordinary Athenian, but he never intends all the associations of our word “God”. For us belief in “God” implies that the universe holds a personal Governor, all-powerful and all-wise, who stands to us in a relation emotional as well as metaphysical. To accept Him is to believe that His purpose embraces the existence and history of the universe and of the humblest creature therein, and because of that belief to merit His love by loving service of our own. These thoughts are to us tremendous commonplaces; they would have bewildered any fifth-century Greek save Æschylus.[752] θεός means a power, usually but not necessarily personal, which is outside ourselves and affects our life in a manner which cannot be affected by any wish or act of ours, save possibly to a small degree by ritual submission. Dionysus, like the other “gods,” is a permanent fact of life personified. We must give him respect, take account of him in our conduct and judgment of others. To ignore him is not so much sin as utter blindness. If we insist on the personality of Dionysus we find him attractive but deadly, a deity who employs his might to entangle the threads of life, crushing hearts better than his own. In so far as he is a person he is unthinkable. But as a fact of life, with no more purpose or will than the force of gravitation, he is neither good nor bad, simply a profound reality, one of the elements we must consider in building our lives. Cadmus expresses this lesson: “If anyone despises the supernatural powers, let him look on the death of this man and believe in the gods”.[753]