who accepted the alternative and went into the one camp or the other according to their natures; but the Greek legend did not necessitate this.  There was found, as in AEschylus, a hint of reconciliation, which may be taken to represent that conviction so deep in the heart of humanity, that there is “ultimate decency in things,” if one could only find it out; although knowledge must always remain dangerous, and may at times cost a man dear.

The real secret lies in the progress of thought in its conceptions of God and life.  Nature, as we know and experience it, presents indeed an appalling spectacle against which everything that is good in us protests.  God, so long as He is but half understood, is utterly unpardonable; and no man yet has succeeded in justifying the ways of God to men.  But “to understand all is to forgive all”—­or rather, it is to enter into a larger view of life, and to discover how much there is in us that needs to be forgiven.  This is the wonderful story which was told by the Hebrews so dramatically in their Book of Job; and the phases through which that drama passes might be taken as the completest commentary on the myth of Prometheus which ever has been or can be written.

In two great battlegrounds of the human spirit the problem raised by Prometheus has been fought out.  On the ground of science, who does not know the defiant and Titanic mood in which knowledge has at times been sought?  The passion for knowing flames through the gloom and depression and savagery of the darker moods of the student.  Difficulties are continually thrust into the way of knowledge.  The upper powers seem to be jealous and outrageously thwarting, and the path of learning becomes a path of tears and blood.  That is all that has been reached by many a grim and brave student spirit.  But there is another possible explanation; and there are those who have attained to a persuasion that the gods have made knowledge difficult in order that the wise may also be the strong.

The second battleground is that of philanthropy.  Here also there has been an apparently reasonable Titanism.  Men have struggled in vain, and then protested in bitterness, against the waste and the meaninglessness of the human debacle.  The only aspect of the powers above them has seemed to many noble spirits that of the sheer cynic.  He that sitteth in the heavens must be laughing indeed.  In Prometheus the Greek spirit puts up its daring plea for man.  It pleads not for pity merely, but for the worth of human nature.  The strong gods cannot be justified in oppressing man upon the plea that might is right, and that they may do what they please.  The protest of Prometheus, echoed by Browning’s protest of Ixion, appeals to the conscience of the world as right; and, kindling a noble Titanism, puts the divine oppressor in the wrong.  Finally, there dawns over the edge of the ominous dark, the same hope that Prometheus vaguely hinted to the Greek.  To him who has understood the story of Calvary, the ultimate interpretation of all human suffering is divine love.  That which the cross of Prometheus in all its outrageous cruelty yet hints as in a whisper, the Cross of Christ proclaims to the end of time, shouting down the centuries from its blood and pain that God is love, and that in all our affliction He is afflicted.