poem and many a sufferer do.
Satan--this drama says--Satan sent this ruin. God has not seared this
man's flesh with the white heats of lightning, nor brought him into
penury nor suspicion, nor made his heart widowed. God is dispenser of
good, not evil; for while an argument is not to be enforced against
punitive justice, seeing justice is a necessity of goodness, yet we are
to affirm that the notion of God slaying Job's children (or anybody's
children, so far as that runs), or blotting out his prosperity, is
obnoxious to reason and to heart. This drama perpetrates no such
blunder. Satan sent these disasters; for with him is evil purpose.
The very nobility of Job stings him to enmity and madness; for iniquity
is his delight, and ruin his vocation and pleasure. A power without
man working evil is consonant with history and experience, and to
suppose this power a person rather than an influence is as rational as
to suppose God not a barren principle, but a Person, fertile in love
and might and righteousness. In the drama of Job, God is not smirched.
He is not Hurter, but Helper. In "Prometheus Bound," Zeus is tyrant;
in Shelley's "Prometheus Unbound," Zeus is tyrant run mad. In Job, God
is majesty enthroned; thoughtful, interested, loving; permitting, not
administering evil; hearing and heeding a bewildered man's cry, and
coming to his rescue, like as some gracious emancipator comes, to break
down prison doors and set wronged prisoners free. In Job, God is not
aspersed, a thing so easy to do in literature and so often done. Here
is no dubious biography, where God is raining disaster instead of
mercies. To misrepresent God seems to me a high crime and
misdemeanor--nay, _the_ high crime and misdemeanor; because on the
righteousness of God hangs the righteousness of the moral system
embracing all souls everywhere, and to misconceive or misinterpret God,
sins against the highest interests of the world, since life never rises
higher than the divinity it conceives and worships. The permissive
element in Divine administration is here clearly distinguished.
Complex the system is, and not sum-totally intelligible as yet, though
we may, and do, get hints of vision, as one catches through the thick
ranks of forest-trees occasional glimpses of sky-line, where room is
made by a gash in the ranks of woods, and the open looks in like some
one standing outside a window with face toward us.

This drama of goodness gives words a