O God of gods, the devil’s Creator and Master, without whom Satan could not be, nor hell, nor trees forbidden, nor blast of death--O Mystery of Being--what can our souls say in their groaning? And how, through anguish so intolerable, can they pray? I am afraid to build, because the higher the tower the more deadly the fall. Dost Thou watch our rising towers and delight to rain Thy fires on them, lest our pride should abound and our damnation be aggravated by our vanity? And God’s own Book it is that tells the good man’s pains, and that revels in swelling rhetoric over the rottenness and despair of the man who feared God and eschewed evil! And what unguided hands--if hands unguided--set the tale of wrong and woe and sorrow next to the very Psalter? Is not the irony immoral, because cruel? Or is there meaning in all this? Is it Life’s story down to the very letter and jot of reality? How better to come out of the valley than to the harping and song of musicians who have known the way of the Almighty and tasted the counsels of Heaven? Cheer thee, O poor soul! Thou art today miserable as Job, but tomorrow thou mayest dance to the music of David. Tomorrow thou mayest have a harp of thine own. A tree of the Lord’s right hand planting arises loftily and broadly in the warm air. Birds twitter and sing as they flit through its warp and woof of light and shade. It is a tree whose leaves might heal the nations. What sudden wind makes it writhe? What Spirit torments every branch and leaf? What Demon yells in triumph as the firm trunk splits and falls in twain? Was it grown for such a fate as this? Better if the seed had been crushed and thrown into the fire than that it should have been thus reared and perfected and then put to shame among the trees of the field. Who can give speech to this flood as it plunges from rock to rock in the black night time? Hush! There is a man’s voice in the infinite storm: “Let the day perish in which I was born! Let it be darkness; let that night be joyless, let no song enter into it; let them who curse the day stigmatize it who are ready to stir up the leviathan. Why died I not from the womb? Then had I lain down and been quiet; I had slept; … there the wicked cease from troubling, and there the wearied mighty rest; the prisoners sweetly repose together, they hear not the voice of the exactor, and the slave is free from his lord.” These are human words, but are they not too strong, too rhetorical, to be true? No! For who can mechanize the rhetoric of woe? “Why is life given to the miserable, and to one who would be blithe to find a grave? I have no quiet, no repose, for trouble on trouble came, and my sighs gush out like waters long dammed back.” No doubt the rhetoric is lofty, yet with a strange familiarity it touches with happy expressiveness all that is most vivid in our remembrance of woe.