Ruler of the world
permits bad men to flourish and increase, while the righteous are
crushed beneath their feet: and, as in the Book of Job, so here, the
question is not, probably because it cannot be, fully answered.

It is the consolation of philosophy, not of religion, or at any rate not
of revealed religion, which is here administered. So marked is the
silence of Boethius on all those arguments, which a discussion of this
kind inevitably suggests to the mind of a believer in the Crucified One,
that scholars long supposed that he was not even by profession a
Christian. A manuscript which has been lately discovered[132] seems to
prove beyond a doubt that Boethius was a Christian, and wrote orthodox
treatises on disputed points of theology; but for some reason or other
he fell back on his early philosophical studies, rather than on his
formal and conventional Christianity, when he found himself in the deep
waters of adversity and imminent death. He represents himself in the
"Consolation" as lying on his dungeon-couch, sick in body and sad at
heart, and courting the Muses as companions of his solitude. They come
at his call, but are soon unceremoniously dismissed by one nobler than
themselves, who asserts an older and higher right to cheer her votary
in the day of his calamity. This is Philosophy, a woman of majestic
stature, whose head seems to touch the skies, and who has undying youth
and venerable age mysteriously blended in her countenance. Having
dismissed the Muses, she sits by the bedside of Boethius and looks with
sad and earnest eyes into his face. She invites him to pour out his
complaints; she sings to him songs first of pity and reproof, then of
fortitude and hope; she reasons with him as to the instability of the
gifts of Fortune, and strives to lead him to the contemplation of the
_Summum Bonum_, which is God Himself, the knowledge of whom is the
highest happiness. Then, in order a little to lighten his difficulties
as to the permission of evil by the All-wise and Almighty One, she
enters into a discussion of the relation between Divine Foreknowledge
and Human Free-will, but this discussion, a thorny and difficult one, is
not ended when the book comes to an abrupt conclusion, being probably
interrupted by the arrival of the messengers of Theodoric, who brought
the warrant for the writer's execution.

[Footnote 132: Called the "Anecdoton Holderi", from the German scholar
who has edited it.]

The "Conso