shall ever (which is an idle and
futile supposition) be so sweet that his heart shall desire it to
linger, then, indeed, he will surrender himself eternally to this at
present preposterous Mephistopheles, whom his mood, his magic, and the
revulsion of his moral nature have evoked:--

"Then let the death-bell chime the token!
Then art thou from thy service free!
The clock may stop, the hand be broken,
And time be finished unto me."

Such an hour, it is destined, shall arrive, after many long and
miserable years, when, aware of the beneficence of living for others and
in the imagined prospect of leading, guiding, and guarding a free people
upon a free land, Faust shall be willing to say to the moment: "Stay,
thou art so fair"; and Mephistopheles shall harshly cry out: "The clock
stands still"; and the graybeard shall sink in the dust; and the holy
angels shall fly away with his soul, leaving the Fiend baffled and
morose, to gibe at himself over the failure of all his infernal arts.
But, meanwhile, it remains true of the man that no pleasure satisfies
him and no happiness contents, and "death is desired, and life a thing
unblest."

The man who puts out his eyes must become blind. The sin of Faust is a
spiritual sin, and the meaning of all his subsequent terrible experience
is that spiritual sin must be--and will be--expiated. No human soul can
ever be lost. In every human soul the contest between good and evil must
continue until the good has conquered and the evil is defeated and
eradicated. Then, when the man's spirit is adjusted to its environment
in the spiritual world, it will be at peace--and not till then. And if
this conflict is not waged and completed now and here, it must be and it
will be fought out and finished hereafter and somewhere else. It is the
greatest of all delusions to suppose that you can escape from yourself.
Judgment and retribution proceed within the soul and not from sources
outside of it. That is the philosophic drift of the poet's thought
expressed and implied in his poem. It was Man, in his mortal ordeal--the
motive, cause, and necessity of which remain a mystery--whom he desired
and aimed to portray; it was not merely the triumph of a mocking devil,
temporarily victorious through ministration to animal lust and
intellectual revolt, over the weakness of the carnal creature and the
embittered bewilderment of the baffled mind. Mr. Irving may well say, as
he is reported to