And God, for their confusion, laugh’d consent;
Yet did so far relent,
That they might seek relief, and not in vain,
In dashing of themselves against the shores of pain.”
Was there ever a truer picture painted by man of the curse of lost souls and the hopeless relief they find “in dashing of themselves against the shores of pain”—that relief that the demented seek in beating their weary brains out or letting out the stream of the tired and useless life into the dark ocean of infinity, severing with maddened and sacrilegious hand the little knot that separates Time from Eternity? And what stronger picture of the prevalence of evil and the inherent tendency in the fallen world to rebel than this:
“Nor bides alone in hell
The bond-disdaining spirit boiling to rebel.
But for compulsion of strong grace,
The pebble in the road
Would straight explode,