It is now some three centuries since the last of such reopenings.  If we ask ourselves how much during this time has been actually added to the sum of our knowledge in these matters, what—­in all the thousands upon thousands of sermons and theologies, and philosophies with which Europe has been deluged—­has been gained for mankind beyond what we have found in this very book of Job for instance; how far all this has advanced us in the “progress of humanity,” it were hard, or rather it is easy to answer.  How far we have fallen below, let Paley and the rest bear witness; but what moral question can be asked which admits now of a nobler solution than was offered two, perhaps three thousand years ago?  The world has not been standing still, experience of man and life has increased, questions have multiplied on questions, while the answers of the established teachers to them have been growing every day more and more incredible.  What other answers have there been?  Of all the countless books which have appeared, there has been only one of enduring importance, in which an attempt is made to carry on the solution of the great problem.  Job is given over 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