But in every race ethical development reaches a stage in which these majestic beings, concerned only about their worship according to etiquette, are challenged. Thus in the “Cyclops” of Euripides (xxxv. 3–5), Ulysses says: “O Jove, guardian of strangers, behold these things; for if thou regardest them not, thou, Jove, being nought, art vainly esteemed a god.”
From the first Solomon to the last, the whole intellectual development in Judea, which I have called Solomonic, means the subjection of all conceptions of the divine nature and laws to the moral sentiment and the reason of man. It was no denial of invisible beings, or of man’s relation to the universe, but a demand that all definitions and conceptions should be approached through science, experience and wisdom.
Solomon, and the Second Solomon, rest in their unknown graves; their wisdom is corrupted; but their genius survives in the earth. Of old it was said God looked down from heaven on the children of men, and found that there was “none that doeth good, no not one.” But it is now man who, with eyes illumined by the brave and cultured Solomons of all lands and ages, looks upon the gods to see if there be one that doeth good. The best of them are defended only by a plea that evil is the mask of their benevolence. But it is not humanly moral to do evil that good may come.
Our great Omar Khayyám, by Fitzgerald’s help, says:
“O Thou, who Man of baser earth didst make,
And ev’n with Paradise devise the Snake:
For all the Sin wherewith the face of Man
Is blacken’d—Man’s forgiveness give—and take!”
The agreement may be fair enough so far as it concerns Sin, in the theological sense, but no Omnipotence, with unlimited choice of means to ends, could be forgiven for the agonies of nature, even did they result in benefits,—as generally they do not, so far as is known to the experience of mankind.