Clouds shows a preoccupation with further difficulties. He had puzzled himself over the origin of evil. External circumstances, he perceived—the truth is painfully clear—may lead the same person either to vice or to virtue, to the lowest degradation or to a happy life. He found in the Book of Job the grandest exposition and the best solution of the old problem of the apparently arbitrary distribution of happiness among the good and the wicked. He read Spinoza, and, like all competent readers, was profoundly impressed by the great vision of a universe of incarnate logic, though he repudiates the conclusion that we are throughout products of inexorable law. The essays[1] on these topics and upon New Testament criticism show that his literary faculty, at least, had developed very rapidly and found a more appropriate employment than novel-writing. He had been reading widely, though he does not claim to be more than an intelligent observer of the great currents of contemporary thought. He was by nature a literary artist, not an abstract reasoner; and he sought to find a solution by looking at the concrete history of the Churches instead of examining the philosophical basis of their
- ↑ Short Studies, vol. i.
