vainly on the whole....
Onward! onward! toiling ever,
weary steps and slow;
doubting oft, despairing never,
to the goal we go!”
To what goal? Well,
“The chances are I go where most men go.”
Let us leave the rest with God—God whose “dealings with us” are unfathomable, God who is “fathomless.” Thus he achieves his resignation. But he never blinds himself to things; he never answers “the painful riddle of the earth” by “stopping up his mouth with a clod” (as Heine says). This world is a
“world of rapine and wrong,
where the weak and the timid seem lawful prey