Made them to plague, as Caliban would have done. And caprice is Setebos's method. He does things wantonly. No noble master passion flames in him. No goodness blesses him. Such a god Caliban makes, so that it is odds whether Caliban make God or God make Caliban. Be sure, a man-made god is like the man who made him. The sole explanation of God, "who dwelleth in light which no man can approach unto," and who is whiter than the light in which he dwells, is, he is not myth, man-made. God made man, and revealed to him the Maker. Thus only do we explain the surpassing picture the prophets and the Christ and the evangelists have left us of the mighty God. Caliban will persist in the belief that the visible system was created in Setebos's moment of being ill at ease and in cruel sportiveness. Nature is a freak of a foul mind. But Caliban's god is not solitary. How hideous were the Aztec gods! They were pictured horrors. Montezuma's gods were Caliban's. Caliban's Setebos was another Moloch of the Canaanites, or a Hindoo Krishna. And the Greek and Norse gods were the infirm shadows of the men who dreamed them. Who says, after familiarizing himself with the religions of the world, that Caliban or his theology is myth? Setebos has no morals. He has might. But this was Jupiter. Read "Prometheus Bound," and know a Greek conception of Greek Zeus:
"Such shows nor right nor wrong in him,
Nor kind nor cruel: He is strong and Lord.
Am strong myself compared to yonder crabs
That march now from the mountain to the sea;
Let twenty pass and stone the twenty-first,
Loving not, hating not, just choosing so."
How hideous this god, decrepit in all save power! But for argument, suppose
"He is good i' the main,
Placable if his mind and ways were guessed,
But rougher than his handiwork, be sure."
Caliban thinks Setebos is himself a creature, made by something he calls "Quiet;" and what is this but the Gnostic notion of aeons and their subordination to the great, hid God? No, this brief dramatic lyric is far from being an imagination. Rather say it is a chapter taken from the history of man's traffic in gods. Setebos is creative; lacks moral qualities in that he may be evil or good; acts from spleen, and by simple caprice; is loveless; to be feared, deceived, tricked, as Caliban tricks Prospero,—so run the crude theological speculations of this man. He gets no step nearer truth. He walks in circles. He is shut in by common human limitations. Man can not dream about the sky until he has seen a sky, nor can he dream out God till God has been revealed. Caliban is no more helpless here than other men. His failure in theology is a picture of the failure of all men. God must show himself at Sinais and at Calvarys, at cross and grave and resurrection and ascension; must pass from the disclosure of his being the "I Am" to those climacteric moments of the world when he discovered to us that he was the "I am Love" and the "I am the Resurrection and the Life." God is
"Terrible: watch his feats in proof!
One hurricane will spoil six good months' hope,
He hath a spite against me, that I know,
Just as He favors Prospero; who knows why?
So it is all the same as well I find.
. . . So much for spite."
There is no after-life.
"He doth His worst in this our life,
Giving just respite lest we die through pain,
Saving last pain for worst—with which, an end.
Meanwhile, the best way to escape His ire
Is, not to seem too happy."
Poor Caliban, not to have known that in the summer of man's joy our God grows glad! All he hopes is,
"Since evils sometimes mend,
Warts rub away and sores are cured with slime,
That some strange day, will either the Quiet catch
And conquer Setebos, or likelier he
Decrepit may doze, doze, as good as die."