The poem must have been penned at a time when the poet's own misfortunes, or the general disorders of the age, were such as seemed to clash irreconcilably with his preconceived notions of God's goodness, character, and purposes. The shock of this collision between fact and theory shook to its foundations the structure of his inherited creed, and opened great fissures of questioning in the fabric of his personal faith. He was tempted to abandon the believing habits of a religious training and the confiding instincts of a naturally devout heart, and either to doubt the being and power of the Almighty, or to deny His wisdom and beneficence. For a long time he was tossed hither and thither on the alternate ebb and flow of questioning denial and believing affirmation, finding nowhere any firm foothold amid the unstable tumult of conflicting evidence and inconclusive reasoning. At last out of the confusion there dawned on his mind a growing persuasion of something clear and certain. He perceived that not only was the balance of evidence indecisive, but also that the issue never could but be indeterminate. For he saw that the method itself was impotent, and could never reach or unravel the themes of his agonised questioning. A settled conviction forced itself upon his mind that there are in life problems no human ingenuity can solve, questions that baffle man's intellect to comprehend, "great matters, and things too high" for him. It was a discovery startling, strange, and painful. But at least it was something solid and certain; it was firm land, on which one's feet might be planted. Moreover, it was not an ending, but a beginning, a starting-point that led somewhere. Perchance it might prove to be the first step in a rocky pathway, that should guide his footsteps to heights of clearer light and wider vision, where the heart, if not the intellect, might reach a solution of its questioning and enter into rest. The quest he had commenced had turned out a quest of the unattainable, but it had brought him to a real and profitable discovery. He had recognised and accepted once and for ever the fact of the fixed and final limitation of human knowledge.