ul to men's purposes must be assigned to
their own irrationality as its cause. Herein lies the explanation of
that paradox in religious feeling which attributes sin to the free will,
but repentance and every good work to divine grace. Physically
considered--as theology must consider the matter--both acts and both
volitions are equally necessary and involved in the universal order; but
practical religion calls divine only what makes for the good. Whence it
follows at once that, both within and without us, what is done well is
God's doing, and what is done ill is not.

[Sidenote: The standard of value is human.]

Thus what we may call the practical or Hebrew theory of cosmic
rationality betrays in plainest possible manner that reason is primarily
a function of human nature. Reason dwells in the world in so far as the
world is good, and the world is good in so far as it supports the wills
it generates--the excellence of each creature, the value of its life,
and the satisfaction of its ultimate desires. Thus Hebrew optimism could
be moral because, although it asserted in a sense the morality of the
universe, it asserted this only by virtue of a belief that the universe
supported human ideals. Undoubtedly much insistence on the greatness of
that power which made for righteousness was in danger of passing over
into idolatry of greatness and power, for whatever they may make. Yet
these relapses into Nature-worship are the more rare in that the Jews
were not a speculative people, and had in the end to endow even Job with
his worldly goods in order to rationalise his constancy. It was only by
a scandalous heresy that Spinoza could so change the idea of God as to
make him indifferent to his creatures; and this transformation, in spite
of the mystic and stoical piety of its author, passed very justly for
atheism; for that divine government and policy had been denied by which
alone God was made manifest to the Hebrews.

If Job's reward seems to us unworthy, we must remember that we have
since passed through the discipline of an extreme moral idealism,
through a religion of sacrifice and sorrow. We should not confuse the
principle that virtue must somehow secure the highest good (for what
should not secure it would not be virtue) with the gross symbols by
which the highest good might be expressed at Jerusalem. That Job should
recover a thousand she-asses may seem to us a poor sop for his long
anguish of mind and body, and we may h