Whence? and whither? and why? is a triad of questions over which men have broken their hearts; in a sense they must always remain un answered, or at least incompletely answered; and yet as long as men have made them, one response at least has brought with it peace. The problem of life and death was stated long ages before Omar's day by another Eastern thinker, and with a poignancy greater at times than his. Nowhere in Hebrew literature do we get a deeper sense of the gloomy mystery of life than in the book of Ecclesiastes, where again and again the writer makes lament over triumphant injustice, and the end that comes alike to good and bad. There passes before his eyes the melancholy pageant of the children of men, journeying along through the ages to the common goal of endless oblivion. "All things come alike to all," he cries; "there is one event to the righteous and to the wicked; to the good and to the clean and to the unclean; to him that sacrificeth and to him that sacrificeth not; as is the good, so is the sinner; and he that sweareth as he that feareth an oath. This is an evil that is done under the sun, that there is one event unto all; yea, also, the heart of the sons of men is full of evil, and madness is in their heart while they live, and after that they go to the dead." And so too, he goes on to speak of death as annihilation which puts the noblest of dead creatures below the basest of the living. Probably most men have known some [p.118] dark hour at least in which the tragedy of life comes home to them, and they have wondered whether after all the old thinker was not right. We take up as our own the refrain of Omar: /I came like water, and like wind I go,/ /Into this Universe and why not knowing,/ /Nor whence, like water willy-nilly flowing,/ /And out of it as wind along the waste,/ /I know not whither, willy-nilly blowing./ Again there echo about us out of the past those ancient questions to which the mind of man is ever framing answers, ever finding unsatisfying those which others have made. How then can religion help, if even with its presence those answers still remain incomplete? When faith comes into our hearts, the mystics may tell us, uncertainty does not go out of them. We are still facing an unknown future, and have no more knowledge of the past than have our fellows. But a new factor has come into our consciousness. We are able to go back and face the old questions, and lo, they no longer seem to cut, as once they did, at the roots of our being. We have hold of something which goes deeper than doubt can reach, or fear can fall to. And strangely enough, the very same metaphor which Omar uses to express his despair comes from the lips of faith, but with how different a meaning: "The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou nearest the sound thereof, and canst not tell [p.119] whence it cometh and whither it goeth. So is everyone that is born of the spirit."