Bacchæ closes with that depressing anti-climax, where Dionysos plays the sorriest part, and Euripides’ own sour dislike of the personal traditional God gives an unpleasant flavour to the last scene. It is this bitterness of protestantism and criticism in this poet that strikes a new note in Greece; and Euripides may be regarded as the first in European history to be possessed with the theologic temper. It cannot be said that he preached a new religion; he was no votary even of Orphism, for though, as the Bacchæ and the fragment of his ‘Cretans’ attest, he felt something of its spell, he was not of that cast of mind that could be deceived by its pharisaic ritual and laws of diet, and he certainly cherished no mystic belief concerning the life after death; for even in the ‘Bacchæ’ there is no reference to this attractive dogma, which was the main anchor of the Orphic faith. Nor can he be truly described as a zealous reformer of the people’s faith and practice; for the reformer must have some belief in that which he wishes to reform; and that Euripides firmly believed in any part of the polytheism is hard to maintain; his final attitude is generally a doubt. Nevertheless, his protests might have been of value to the more cultured citizen who still clave to his civic worship. They are directed mainly and most forcibly against the stories of divine vindictiveness and divine licentiousness. He is evidently touched with the new idea that vengeance is alien to the perfect nature of God; this was still more insistently proclaimed by Plato and by the Pythagoreans and {115} later philosophers.[115.1] On the second count his protest is suggested by the notion that was dawning in him that purity in every sense was essential to the divine nature; he is then the herald in literature of a thought which Orphism may have prompted and which was to play a leading part in later religion and religious speculation, but which was unfamiliar to his contemporaries either in Hellas or anywhere in the Mediterranean except in Israel. His leading principle of criticism in all these matters is expressed in the Iphigeneia in Tauris, namely, that the evil in religious practice and legend arises from men imputing their own evil nature to God.[115.2] We owe much to the man who first uttered this warning against a debasing anthropomorphism.