"And quick the adulterer stood on the bridal steps."
Then he details still more plainly the licentiousness of the fabled Zeus:
"But he nor food nor cleansing water touched,
But heart-stung went to bed, and that whole night
Wantoned."
But let these be resigned to the follies of the theatre.
Heraclltus plainly says: "But of the word which is eternal men are not able to understand, both before they have heard it, and on first hearing it." And the lyrist Melanippides says in song:
"Hear me, Father, Wonder of men,
Ruler of the ever-living soul."
And Parmenides the great, as Plato says in the Sophist, writes of God thus:
"Very much, since unborn and indestructible He is,
Whole, only-begotten, and immoveable, and unoriginated."
Hesiod also says:
For He of the immortals all is King and Lord.
With God[1] none else in might may strive."
Nay more, Tragedy, drawing away from idols, teaches to look up to heaven. Sophocles, as Hecatæus, who composed the histories in the work about Abraham and the Egyptians, says, exclaims plainly on the stage:
"One in very truth, God is One,
Who made the heaven and the far-stretching earth,
The Deep's blue billow, and the might of winds.
But of us mortals, many erring far
In heart, as solace for our woes, have raised
Images of gods—of stone, or else of brass,
Or figures wrought of gold or ivory;
And sacrifices and vain festivals
To these appointing, deem ourselves devout."
And Euripides on the stage, in tragedy, says:
Which holds the earth around in the embrace
- ↑ This is quoted in Exhortation to the Heathen, p. 73, ch. viii. The reading varies, and it has been variously amended. Θεῷ is substituted above for σέο. Perhaps the simplest of the emendations proposed on this passage is the change of σέο into σόι, with Thee.
