Finally, recollect the gulf between a reform in words and its translation into fact. With all our political machinery designed to yield better legislation, how difficult it is to give effect to the will of the wiser and nobler members of the community. Ancient society found it incalculably harder to redress its wrongs. Grievances were not always stifled; they might be aired in moderation and provided the charge was vague. But, short of revolution, how was it possible to bring adequate pressure to bear on the guilty, strongly entrenched in their high offices by birth and wealth and autocratic might? These and similar considerations will suggest the external difficulties of the life in which the Wise were placed. To the “fightings without,” however, must next be added a tale of “fears within.” The Old Testament writers were not unconscious of the intellectual problems of religion. It is true that they do not debate, or often doubt, the _existence_ of God. But the question of the Being of God is, in a sense, academic; the question of His character and relation to men is vital; and this problem the Jews felt as acutely and faced as honestly as any modern men can do. Many of them had encountered realities of experience sterner than most modernists have known--at least until 1914. Some of the Sages, no doubt, were unspeculative persons, content with traditional beliefs. But others there were not blind to any of the poignant elements of life. All may have assumed God as a fact, but some realised that only if God be just and holy and merciful, was the ground of morality solid beneath their feet. Men who maintained that in the fear of the Lord and honourable conduct is found the key to a successful career, could not ignore the fact that in reality the wicked were frequently prosperous and the good subject to misfortune, injustice, pain, and bitter hardships. How could such things be in the world of a righteous God? Not until the post-exilic period was it vividly realised by a number of Jewish thinkers how obdurate these facts are to an optimistic interpretation of life, and how they menace not only belief in a gracious God, but also the whole structure of morality. In many of the later Psalms, and in portions of the Wisdom literature, to which the _Book of Proverbs_ belongs, the stringency of the problem is clearly recognised, and the struggle for faith grows correspondingly severe. Men cried to God to sustain their trust despite the awful enigmas of suffering and wrong. They wrestled agonisingly with the facts, turning now to one, now to another, explanation, if in any wise hope in God might be preserved.