There is much indeed in the sententious poetry of Euripides that might have elevated and cleared the religious thoughts of his age; but it is doubtful if his ultimate conception of Godhead, as it tends towards pantheism, could have been reconciled with the anthropomorphic polytheism of the people or if those most conversant with his tone and inspired by his spirit could have remained long in sympathy with orthodoxy. And there is an instinct in Euripides which enhances his value for the modern man, but which was to be subversive in the longrun of the old civic religion, namely, the humanitarian or cosmopolitan instinct; that which allowed him to sympathise with Trojans, women, children and slaves, which inspired him with the beautiful thought that “the whole earth is the good man’s fatherland,” which also prompted him to despise the life of civic duty and activity and to recommend, as Aristotle does, the secluded and contemplative life. The further development of this cosmopolitan spirit and its effect on the old civic religion will be noted below. It has been necessary to dwell so long on Euripides, not only for the reasons mentioned above, but also because owing to the vogue that he won in his lifetime and that was greatly to increase after his death, he more than any other of the great men of letters must be regarded as the populariser of the new enlightenment. Whether he individually exercised any immediate religious influence upon the popular religious mind, for good or for harm, is not easy to decide with precision; for there were other exponents than he of the same freer and more advanced thought, which {118} began to express itself early in the sixth century. As a result we are able to discern the religious view of human life and conduct, becoming what we should term more spiritual, more inward. The moral judgment begins to look to the soul or the inner principle; the doctrine begins to be proclaimed that God as a spiritual power can read the heart of man and judges him by that; that sin lies not in the external act alone; that external ritualistic purity is of less avail than purity of soul. Such thoughts as these which could serve as the foundation-stones of a new religion and which helped to shape the later religious history of Europe were mainly a heritage from the speculation of the sixth century and were in the air of the fifth. We cannot think that they were confined to the philosophic circles until Euripides gave them publicity; for the notable oracle quoted and commented on by Herodotus had proclaimed to the people the novel view that a sinful purpose was the same in the sight of God as a sinful act;[118.1] Epicharmos, the Sicilian poet of the earlier fifth century, had preached the higher ideal of purity--“if thou art pure in mind, thou art pure in thy whole body.” It was probably in the latter part of the same century that some rhetorician of the school of Gorgias interpolated the proem of