liverance to explode into
twittering laughter and caper-cutting, and utterly to forget the
imminent hawk on bough. Lie low, rather, lie low; for you are in the
hands of a living God. In the Book of Job, for example, the impotence
of man and the omnipotence of God is the exclusive burden of its
author's mind. "It is as high as heaven; what canst thou do?--deeper
than hell; what canst thou know?" There is an astringent relish about
the truth of this conviction which some men can feel, and which for
them is as near an approach as can be made to the feeling of religious
joy.

"In Job," says that coldly truthful writer, the author of Mark
Rutherford, "God reminds us that man is not the measure of his
creation. The world is immense, constructed on no plan or theory which
the intellect of man can grasp. It is TRANSCENDENT everywhere. This is
the burden of every verse, and is the secret if there be one, of the
poem. Sufficient or insufficient, there is nothing more.... God is
great, we know not his ways. He takes from us all we have, but yet if
we possess our souls in patience, we MAY pass the valley of the shadow,
and come out in sunlight again. We may or we may not! ... What more
have we to say now than God said from the whirlwind over two thousand
five hundred years ago?"[29]

[29] Mark Rutherford's Deliverance, London, 1885, pp. 196, 198.

If we turn to the sanguine onlooker, on the other hand, we find that
deliverance is felt as incomplete unless the burden be altogether
overcome and the danger forgotten. Such onlookers give us definitions
that seem to the sombre minds of whom we have just been speaking to
leave out all the solemnity that makes religious peace so different
from merely animal joys. In the opinion of some writers an attitude
might be called religious, though no touch were left in it of sacrifice
or submission, no tendency to flexion, no bowing of the head. Any
"habitual and regulated admiration," says Professor J. R. Seeley,[30]
"is worthy to be called a religion"; and accordingly he thinks that our
Music, our Science, and our so-called "Civilization," as these things
are now organized and admiringly believed in, form the more genuine
religions of our time. Certainly the unhesitating and unreasoning way
in which we feel that we must inflict our civilization upon "lower"
races, by means of Hotchkiss guns, etc., reminds one of nothing so much
as of the early spirit of Islam spreading its re