endures with scorn and patience and stoical acceptance. Unfortunately the outlines of this great tragic allegory have been blurred by time and travestied by feeble copyists. What we know about the tale of Prometheus is but a faint echo of the mythus apprehended by the Greeks anterior to Hesiod, and handled afterwards by Æschylus. Enough, however, remains to make it certain that it was the creation of a race profoundly convinced of present injustice in the divine government of the world. If the soul of man is raised by the attribution of stern heroism, God is lowered to the infamy of a tyrant. But neither is the Hebrew legend on its side theologically flawless. Greek and Jew fail alike to offer a satisfactory solution of the origin of evil. While in the Greek mythus Zeus plays with mankind like a cat with a mouse, the Hebrew story does not explain the justice of that omnipotent Being who created man with capacity for error, and exposed him to temptation. The true critique of the second and third chapters of Genesis has been admirably expressed by Omar Khayyam in the following stanzas: O Thou, who didst with pitfall and with gin Beset the road I was to wander in, Thou wilt not with predestination round Enmesh me, and impute my fall to sin? O Thou, who man of baser earth didst make, And who with Eden didst devise the snake, For all the sin wherewith the face of man Is blackened, man's forgiveness give--and take! Both tales are but crude and early attempts to set forth the primitive mystery of conscience, and to account for the prevalence of pain and death. The æsthetic superiority of the Hebrew conception lies in its idealization of the deity at all costs. God is at least grand and consistent, justified by his own august counsels; and at the very moment of punishing his creatures, he promises deliverance through their own seed. Moreover, a vast antagonistic agency of evil is brought into the field to account for the fall of man; and we are not precluded from even extending our compassion to the deity, who has been thwarted in his schemes for good.