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is to be. But in "Macbeth" we see all the dreadful growth of evil from its earliest suggestion to its final and absolute domination of the nature. The inner workings of passion, the stifling of pity, the hell-fire of remorse, are depicted as nowhere else in literature.

In the earlier drama the poet plays, as it were, upon one instrument. The compass and variety are small. In the later drama he has learned to direct an orchestra, to develop a theme, to interlace one musical motive with another, to organize many forms of emotional expression into one grand and overwhelming harmony. We recognize in both plays the same Shakespeare, but in "Richard III." the poet seems to look down upon human nature from the village spire, while in "Macbeth" he stands upon the mountain top and the whole world of humanity is spread out before him.

Let us compare the Nemesis in "Macbeth" with the Nemesis in "Richard." The witches are supernatural agents of evil who can suggest, but who cannot originate, man's evil decision. Macbeth (13:122) has his warning from Banquo:

'Tis strange :

And oftentimes, to win us to our harm,
The instruments of darkness tell us truths,
Win us with honest trifles, to betray us

In deepest consequence.

But the warning neglected, the temptation cherished, principle undermined, there is a surrender of free-will to Satan, and thenceforth an ever-accelerating course of self-depravation and self-destruction. And sin becomes its own detecter, judge, and tormentor.

Up to the moment of his coronation, Macbeth is un

suspected; his crime seems to have run a successful course. But crime begets crime. To free himself from the penalty of the first, he commits a second. As Schiller has well said:

This is the penalty of evil deed,

That of new evil it becomes the seed.

And the second crime of murdering Banquo opens to all eyes the first crime of murdering Duncan. The rise of Macbeth's fortunes through the first half of the play is succeeded by decline through successive stages till he reaches his miserable end. Vaulting ambition has o'erleaped itself. Efforts to escape destiny are made the very means of fulfilling it. The wicked man is holden in the cords of his own sins. With awful irony the malignant powers that at the first lured him to evil mock at his calamity, until in his despair he cries (5: 8:19):

And be these juggling fiends no more believed,
That palter with us in a double sense;

That keep the word of promise to our ear,

And break it to our hope!

How much more profound and tragic than anything in King Richard's calm and open espousal of evil is this deception and irony of sin in Macbeth! But even here we have a variety of portraiture. Macbeth and Lady Macbeth present a contrast to which we find no likeness in the earlier play. Here ambition, murder, remorse, are seen working themselves out in two different natures, the one the impulsive and practical man of action, the other the woman of thought and will who has committed herself to her husband's purpose, and who un

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He

sexes herself in order to nerve him to the deed. has superstitious faith in the witches, and fear of Banquo's ghost. She has argued herself out of such faith and fear, and sees in supernatural appearances only reflections of ambitious hopes and remorseful feelings.

The man of action cannot bear suspense, and rushes headlong into new crime and into consequent self-disclosure. She can wait and conceal and plan, while he is powerless. But the nervous tension is too great. Nemesis overtakes her in the shape of madness, and her madness is a long confession. "Here's the smell of the blood still," gasps out the night-walking queen; "all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand!" And the madness ends in suicide.

But the Nemesis of Macbeth comes in the shape of infatuation. He blindly trusts the oracle, even while his foes are gathering for his destruction. (5:3:32):

He cries

I'll fight till from my bones my flesh be hack'd.
Send out more horses, skirr the country round;
Hang those that talk of fear. Give me my armor!

And when the falsity of his supernatural tempters is revealed to him, he flings himself desperately into the battle. He meets his death, but his death is virtual suicide, and his suicide is virtual confession.

I do not see how any one can read the tragedies without perceiving that Shakespeare is one of the greatest of ethical teachers. And what is true of these tragedies is true of his work in general, it wakens a response in the deepest heart of man. But not because the poet had any set purpose to be a moral teacher. All this is

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incidental. He aims only to depict life, to show man to himself, to exhibit human nature with its love, its hate, its hope, its fear. But all the more powerful is Shakespeare's testimony to the supremacy of conscience in the moral constitution of man.

The same remarks apply to Shakespeare's treatment of religion and doctrine. He has not set himself to propound dogmas. Whether he was Romanist or Protestant no one can surely tell; the most that we can say is that he disliked Puritanism, and made it once or twice the subject of a casual jest. Homer and Virgil, Dante and Milton, had each his heaven and his hell, and each described without hesitation the unseen world. But Shakespeare has no heaven and no hell; he deals only with this present life; even his ghosts and witches tell us nothing of the life beyond—they are forbidden to tell the secrets of the prison house, and only intimate that they "could a tale unfold, whose lightest word would harrow up the soul" ("Hamlet," 15:13). Our great dramatist is the poet of the secular and not of the religious, of the temporal and not of the eternal.

Here is the limitation of his universality. As Scherer has said: "It is on the boundaries of the invisible world. that Shakespeare's vision fails." But he has, notwithstanding, the most sane and level apprehension of the relations of this life, and his testimony to Christian truth, like his testimony to the ethical facts of remorse and retribution, is all the more valuable because unintentionally given. Let us inquire what this testimony is, and what doctrines of our faith derive confirmation from it. In treating this portion of my theme I avail myself to some extent of the references given so copiously in

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Bishop Wordsworth's excellent book on "Shakespeare and the Bible."

Though Shakespeare does not profess to teach theology, it is not because he has no theology, nor because he regards theology as an impossibility to man. He is not an agnostic. He distinctly maintains the reality and the value, while he confesses the limitations, of our knowledge of God and his relations to the universe. In the second part of "King Henry VI." (4: 7:67), he tells us that

Ignorance is the curse of God,

Knowledge, the wing wherewith we fly to heaven.

In "Antony and Cleopatra" (I1: 2: 8) he says:

In nature's infinite book of secrecy

A little I can read.

He does not hold the naturalistic, any more than he holds the agnostic, view of the universe. In "All's Well That Ends Well" (2:3: 1) he makes Lafeu, the wise man of the play, express himself as follows: "They say miracles are past; and we have our philosophical persons, to make modern and familiar things supernatural and causeless. Hence it is, that we make trifles of terrors, ensconcing ourselves into seeming knowledge, when we should submit ourselves to an unknown fear."

We should expect that this poet of secular life would find in human nature the main source of his knowledge of God. And so it is, for he calls man "the image of his Maker" ("King Henry VIII.," 3: 2: 440). God is a God of justice. In "Measure for Measure" (2276) God is called "the top of judgment." Yet