snaps--and there, there, there, there, there,
His thunder follows! Fool to gibe at Him!
Lo! 'Lieth flat and loveth Setebos!"

And there, like a groveling serpent in the ooze, there lies Caliban,
abject in fear, with not a ray of love. Hopeless, loveless, see him
lie--a spectacle so sad as to make the ragged crags of ocean weep!

So pitiful a theology, yet no more pitiful than theologies created in
our own epoch. Men, not brutal but opinionated, assume to comprehend
all things, God included. They destroy and create theologies with the
flippant egotism of a French chevalier of the days of the Grand
Monarch. They settle matters with a "Thus it is, and thus it is not."
Would not those men do well to read the parable, "Caliban upon
Setebos?" Grant Allen and Huxley would be generously helped; for the
more they would lose in dogmatism, so much the more would they gain in
wisdom. And what is true of them is true of others of their
fraternity. This irony of Browning's is caustic, but very wholesome.
Barren as Caliban's theology is, certain contemporary theologies are
not less so. A day to suffer and enjoy--and then the night, long,
dark, dreamless, eternal!

How sane Browning was! What breadth of meaning is here disclosed!
What preacher of this century has preached a more inspired sermon than
"Caliban upon Setebos?" He saw the irrationality of rationalism. He
knew that knowledge of God came, as the new earth, "down from God out
of heaven." Men will do better to receive theologies from God than to
create them. A life we may live, having the Pattern "showed us in the
mount." Christ gives the lie to Caliban's estimate of Deity. Not
spite, nor misused might, nor caprice, nor life surcharged with either
indifference or spleen; but love and ministry and fertile thought and
wide devotion to others' good, an oblation of Himself--this is God, of
whom Caliban had no dream, and of whom the Christ was exegete.

IV

William the Silent

Few illustrious characters are so little known as William the Silent.
His face has faded from the sky of history as glory from a sunset
cloud; though, on attention, reasons why this is so may not be
difficult to find. Some of them are here catalogued: He did not live
to celebrate the triumph of his statesmanship. The nation whose
autonomy and independence he secured is no longer a Republic, and so
has, in a measure, ceased to bear the stamp of his genius. The narrow
limi