into Satan's hand to be tempted; and though he shakes
he does not fall. Taking the temptation of Job for his
model, Goethe has similarly exposed his Faust to trial,
and with him the tempter succeeds. His hero falls
from sin to sin, from crime to crime; he becomes a
seducer, a murderer, a betrayer, following recklessly
his evil angel wherever he chooses to lead him; and
yet, with all this, he never wholly forfeits our sympathy.
In spite of his weakness his heart is still true to his
higher nature; sick and restless, even in the delirium
of enjoyment, he always longs for something better, and
he never can be brought to say of evil that it is good.
And, therefore, after all, the devil is balked of his prey;
in virtue of this one fact, that the evil in which he
steeped himself remained to the last hateful to him,
Faust is saved by the angels ... And this indeed,
though Goethe has scarcely dealt with it satisfactorily,
is a vast subject. It will be eagerly answered for the
established belief, that such cases are its especial
province. All men are sinners, and it possesses the
blessed remedy for sin. But, among the countless
numbers of those characters so strangely mixed among
us, in which the dark and the bright fibres cross like
a meshwork; characters at one moment capable of
acts of heroic nobleness, 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 nobleness 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." [See the Thirteenth Article.]

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 so