lution which
may guide their judgment. In the writer of the Book
of Job there is an awful moral earnestness before which
we bend as in the presence of a superior being. The
orthodoxy against which he contended is not set aside
or denied; he sees what truth is in it; only he sees
more than it, and over it, and through it. But in
Goethe, who needed it more, inasmuch as his problem
was more delicate and difficult, the moral earnestness is
not awful, is not even high. We cannot feel that in
dealing with sin he entertains any great horror of it;
he looks on it as a mistake, as undesirable, but scarcely
as more. Goethe's great powers are of another kind;
and this particular question, though in appearance the
primary subject of the poem, is really only secondary.
In substance Faust is more like Ecclesiastes than it
is like Job, and describes rather the restlessness of a
largely-gifted nature which, missing the guidance of
the heart, plays experiments with life, trying knowledge,
pleasure, dissipation, one after another, and hating them
all; and then hating life itself as a weary, stale, flat,
unprofitable mockery. The temper exhibited here will
probably be perennial in the world. But the remedy
for it will scarcely be more clear under other circumstances
than it is at present, and lies in the disposition
of the heart, and not in any propositions which can
be addressed to the understanding. For that other
question how rightly to estimate a human being; what
constitutes a real vitiation of character, and how to
distinguish, without either denying the good or making
light of the evil; how to be just to the popular theories.
and yet not to blind ourselves to their shallowness and
injustice-that is a problem for us, for the solution of
which we are at present left to our ordinary instinct,
without any recognized guidance whatsoever.

Nor is this the only problem which is in the same
situation. There can scarcely be a more startling
contrast between fact and theory, than the conditions under
which practically positions of power and influence are
distributed among us, the theory of human worth which
the necessities of life oblige us to act upon and the
theory which we believe that we believe. As we look
around among our leading men, our statesmen, our
legislators, the judges on our bench, the commanders of
our armies, the men to whom this English nation commits
the conduct of its best interests, profane and
sacred, what do