leteness, as a
presentation of the human tragedy, is impaired by the excessive
prosperity which is finally supposed to reward the patient hero for his
fortitude. Job received twice as much as he had before, and his latter
end was blessed more than his beginning. In the chronicles of actual
history men fare not so. There is a terribly logical finish about some
of the dealings of fate, and in life the working of a curse is seldom
stayed by any dramatic necessity for a smooth consummation. Destiny is
no artist. The facts that confront us are relentless. No statement of
the case is adequate which maintains, by ever so delicate an
implication, that in the long run and somehow it is well in temporal
things with the just, and ill with the unjust. Until we have firmly
looked in the face the grim truth that temporal rewards and punishments
do not follow the possession or the want of spiritual or moral virtue,
so long we are still ignorant what that enigma is, which speculative
men, from the author of the book of Job downwards, have striven to
resolve. We can readily imagine the fulness with which the question
would grow up in the mind of a royalist and Catholic exile at the end of
the eighteenth century.

Nothing can be more clearly put than De Maistre's answers to the
question which the circumstances of the time placed before him to solve.
What is the law of the distribution of good and evil fortune in this
life? Is it a moral law? Do prosperity and adversity fall respectively
to the just and the unjust, either individually or collectively? Has the
ancient covenant been faithfully kept, that whoso hearkens diligently to
the divine voice, and observes all the commandments to do them, shall be
blessed in his basket and his store and in all the work of his hand? Or
is God a God that hideth himself?

De Maistre perceived that the optimistic conception of the deity as
benign, merciful, infinitely forgiving, was very far indeed from
covering the facts. So he insisted on seeing in human destiny the
ever-present hand of a stern and terrible judge, administering a
Draconian code with blind and pitiless severity. God created men under
conditions which left them free to choose between good and evil. All the
physical evil that exists in the world is a penalty for the moral evil
that has resulted from the abuse by men of this freedom of choice. For
these physical calamities God is only responsible in the way in which a
criminal judge is r