ob's case, a
cruel and mischievous deception, and the whole question of life and its
obligations must again be opened.

It is now some three centuries since the last of such reopenings. If we
ask ourselves how much during this time has been actually added to the
sum of our knowledge in these matters; what, in all the thousands upon
thousands of sermons, and theologies, and philosophies with which Europe
has been deluged, has been gained for mankind beyond what we have found
in this Book of Job, how far all this has advanced us in the 'progress
of humanity,' it were hard, or rather it is easy, to answer. How far we
have fallen below, let Paley and the rest bear witness. But what moral
question can be asked which admits now of a grander solution than was
offered two, perhaps three, thousand years ago? The world has not been
standing still; experience of man and life has increased; questions have
multiplied on questions, while the answers of the established teachers
to them have been growing every day more and more incredible. What other
answers have there been? Of all the countless books which have appeared,
there has been only one of enduring importance, in which an attempt is
made to carry on the solution of the great problem. Job is given over
into Satan's hand to be tempted; and though he shakes, he does not fall.
Taking the temptation of Job for his model, Goethe has similarly
exposed his Faust to trial, and with him the tempter succeeds. His hero
falls from sin to sin, from crime to crime; he becomes a seducer, a
murderer, a betrayer, following recklessly his evil angel wherever he
chooses to lead him; and yet, with all this, he never wholly forfeits
our sympathy. In spite of his weakness, his heart is still true to his
higher nature; sick and restless, even in the delirium of enjoyment he
always longs for something better, and he never can be brought to say of
evil that it is good. And therefore, after all, the devil is balked of
his prey; in virtue of this one fact, that the evil in which he steeped
himself remained to the last hateful to him, Faust is saved by the
angels.... It will be eagerly answered for the established belief, that
such cases are its especial province. All men are sinners, and _it_
possesses the blessed remedy for sin. But, among the countless numbers
of those characters so strangely mixed among us, in which the dark and
the bright fibres cross like a meshwork; characters at one moment
capable