hom the prophet described as drawing iniquity with
cords of vanity, and sin as it were with a cart rope? It would not
matter so much, we sometimes bitterly reflect, if the sinner injured
only himself by his wickedness; but how often are the innocent made to
suffer by the devices of the unscrupulous and selfish! Why, we repeat,
this strange non-intervention of the Most High on behalf of His own
cause? {104} On this it must be remarked in the first place that those
who accept God's transcendence will be careful not to rule out _a
priori_ the possibility of such Divine action as, regarded from our
point of view, would have to be described as intervention; the question
whether such action has ever taken place, is a question of fact, and
the view that at particular junctures God has thus actively
"intervened" is at any rate capable of being strongly argued. But
admitting, as we think we must, that ordinary life does not show any
instances of such supernatural interposition--that a reckless financier
is allowed to enrich himself by cornering the wheat supply and sending
up the price of the people's bread; that a band of reactionaries may
arrest the course of reform and plunge a country back into darkness;
that a beneficent act of the legislature may be defeated by greedy
cunning--must we despair of solving the general problem which such
cases suggest?

We think, on the contrary, that the explanation may be legitimately
sought in what we conceive to have been the Divine intention in making
man free; that intention, the making of character, would obviously
suffer defeat by God throwing His weight--if we may use such a
phrase--into this scale as against that, furthering here and checking
there, for character, as we just said, can only result from the free
exercise and interplay of will with will. We may well imagine God's
mode of action to {105} resemble that of a human parent who entrusts a
growing child with a growing measure of liberty and responsibility,
well knowing that in the use of it he will have many a slip and
stumble, and occasionally hurt himself; such a parent will carefully
refrain from interference, preferring that the child should learn his
own lessons from his own mistakes, well knowing that we profit only by
the experience for which we ourselves have paid. No one will, of
course, pretend that such a reconciliation of the facts of sin with the
axiom or intuition of Divine all-goodness is other than incomp