and proceeds in verse 14 with his inanities. And these have prevailed ever since. Even Jesus, when he took up the burden of Wisdom, and rebuked the Jahvist superstition that those on whom a tower fell were subjects of a judgment, must have his stupid corrector to add, "Except ye repent ye shall all likewise perish." This simpleton's superstition has taken the place of the great successor of Solomon, and to-day, amid all the learning of Christendom, is proclaiming that the Father is "permitting" all the Satans,--war, disease, earthquake, famine,--to harry his children just to test them or to chasten them. Why should omnipotence create a race requiring worse than inquisitorial tortures for its discipline? In all the literature of Christendom there is not one honest attempt to deal with the evils and agonies of nature; and at this moment we find theists apotheosizing the "Unknowable from which all things proceed," without any appreciation of the fact that in the remote past Jahvism sought the same refuge, and that it was proved by Job a refuge of fallacies. In an awakening moral and humane sentiment Job stands in this latter day upon the earth, and again steadily repeats his demand why one should respect an Unknowable from whom all things,--all horrors and agonies,--proceed. Ethically we are required to do no evil that good may come; theologically, to worship a deity who is doing just that all the time. This is no doubt a convenient doctrine for the Christian nations that wish to preserve their own property and peace at home, while acting as banditti in remote continents and islands. All such atrocities are enacted and adopted as part of the providential plan of spreading the Gospel, latterly "civilisation"; but it is very certain that there can be no such thing as national civilisation until evil is recognised as evil, good as good,--the one to be abhorred, the other loved,--and no deity respected whose government would wrong a worm. CHAPTER VIII. THE BOOK OF PROVERBS AND THE AVESTA. The legend of the Queen of Sheba forms not only a poetic prologue to the epical tradition of Solomon's wisdom, but has a substantial connexion with the character of that wisdom, to whose final personification she contributed. The corresponding Oriental stories do not necessarily deprive this legend of historic basis, but point to the region of this "Queen of the Seven (Sheba)." Those Oriental pilgrimages of eminent women to great sages, however invested with magnificence, are natural; even such romances could not have been invented unless in accordance with the genius of the country in which they were written. There is no antecedent improbability that a queen, belonging to a region in which her sex enjoyed large freedom, should have made a journey to meet Solomon.