strength, by whose aid
Corneille was able to depict the God of the Christians as the august,
omnipresent actor of his dramas, invisible but untiringly active, and
sovereign always? Or is it possible still for a reasonable being,
whose eyes rest calmly on the life about him, to believe in the tyranny
of fate; of that sluggish, unswerving, preordained, inscrutable force
which urges a given man, or family, by given ways to a given disaster
or death? For though it be true that our life is subject to many an
unknown force, we at least are aware that these forces would seem to be
blind, indifferent, unconscious, and that their most insidious attacks
may be in some measure averted by the wisest among us. Can we still be
allowed, then, to believe that the universe holds a power so idle, so
wretched, as to concern itself solely in saddening, frustrating, and
terrifying the projects and schemes of man?

Immanent justice is another mysterious and sovereign force, whereof use
has been made; but it is only the feeblest of writers who have ventured
to accept this postulate in its entirety: only those to whom reality
and probability were matters of smallest moment. The affirmation that
wickedness is necessarily and visibly punished in this life, and virtue
as necessarily and visibly rewarded, is too manifestly opposed to the
most elementary daily experience, too wildly inconsistent a dream, for
the true poet ever to accept it as the basis of his drama. And, on the
other hand, if we refer to a future life the bestowal of reward and
punishment, we are merely entering by another gate the region of divine
justice. For, indeed, unless immanent justice be infallible,
permanent, unvarying, and inevitable, it becomes no more than a
curious, well-meaning caprice of fate; and from that moment it no
longer is justice, or even fate: it shrinks into merest chance--in
other words, almost into nothingness.

There is, it is true, a very real immanent justice; I refer to the
force which enacts that the vicious, malevolent, cruel, disloyal man
shall be morally less happy than he who is honest and good,
affectionate, gentle, and just. But here it is inward justice whose
workings we see; a very human, natural, comprehensible force, the study
of whose cause and effect must of necessity lead to psychological
drama, where there no longer is need of the vast and mysterious
background which lent its solemn and awful perspective to the events of
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