of acts of heroic greatness, at another hurried by temptation
into actions which even common men may deplore, how many are there who
have never availed themselves of the conditions of reconciliation as
orthodoxy proffers them, and of such men what is to be said? It was said
once of a sinner that to her 'much was forgiven, for she loved much.'
But this is language which theology has as little appropriated as the
Jews could appropriate the language of Job. It cannot recognise the
power of the human heart. It has no balance in which to weigh the good
against the evil; and when a great Burns or a Mirabeau comes before it,
it can but tremblingly count up the offences committed, and then,
looking to the end, and finding its own terms not to have been complied
with, it faintly mutters its anathema. Sin only it can apprehend and
judge; and for the poor acts of struggling heroism, 'Forasmuch as they
were not done,' &c., &c., it doubts not but they have the nature of
sin.[M]

Something of the difficulty has been met by Goethe, but it cannot be
said that he has resolved it; or at least that he has furnished others
with a solution which may guide their judgment. In the writer of the
Book of Job there is an awful moral earnestness before which we bend as
in the presence of a superior being. The orthodoxy against which he
contended is not set aside or denied; he sees what truth is in it; only
he sees more than it, and over it, and through it. But in Goethe, who
needed it more, inasmuch as his problem was more delicate and difficult,
the moral earnestness is not awful, is not even high. We cannot feel
that in dealing with sin he entertains any great horror of it; he looks
on it as a mistake, as undesirable, but scarcely as more. Goethe's great
powers are of another kind; and this particular question, though in
appearance the primary subject of the poem, is really only secondary. In
substance, Faust is more like Ecclesiastes than it is like Job, and
describes rather the restlessness of a largely-gifted nature which,
missing the guidance of the heart, plays experiments with life, trying
knowledge, pleasure, dissipation, one after another, and hating them
all; and then hating life itself as a weary, stale, flat, unprofitable
mockery. The temper exhibited here will probably be perennial in the
world. But the remedy for it will scarcely be more clear under other
circumstances than it is at present, and lies in the disposition of the
emoti