God and life. Nature, as we know and experience it, presents indeed an
appalling spectacle against which everything that is good in us
protests. God, so long as He is but half understood, is utterly
unpardonable; and no man yet has succeeded in justifying the ways of God
to men. But "to understand all is to forgive all"--or rather, it is to
enter into a larger view of life, and to discover how much there is in
_us_ that needs to be forgiven. This is the wonderful story which was
told by the Hebrews so dramatically in their Book of Job; and the phases
through which that drama passes might be taken as the completest
commentary on the myth of Prometheus which ever has been or can be
written.

In two great battlegrounds of the human spirit the problem raised by
Prometheus has been fought out. On the ground of science, who does not
know the defiant and Titanic mood in which knowledge has at times been
sought? The passion for knowing flames through the gloom and depression
and savagery of the darker moods of the student. Difficulties are
continually thrust into the way of knowledge. The upper powers seem to
be jealous and outrageously thwarting, and the path of learning becomes
a path of tears and blood. That is all that has been reached by many a
grim and brave student spirit. But there is another possible
explanation; and there are those who have attained to a persuasion that
the gods have made knowledge difficult in order that the wise may also
be the strong.

The second battleground is that of philanthropy. Here also there has
been an apparently reasonable Titanism. Men have struggled in vain, and
then protested in bitterness, against the waste and the meaninglessness
of the human _débâcle_. The only aspect of the powers above them has
seemed to many noble spirits that of the sheer cynic. He that sitteth in