Winwood Reade, in the title of his book, The Martyrdom of Man, intends to describe human history. O. W. Holmes says that Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress “represents the universe as a trap which catches most of the human vermin that have its bait dangled before them.” Strauss: “If the prophets of pessimism prove that man had better never have lived, they thereby prove that themselves had better never have prophesied.” Hawthorne, Note-book: “Curious to imagine what mournings and discontent would be excited, if any of the great so-called calamities of human beings were to be abolished,—as, for instance, death.” On both the optimism of Leibnitz and the pessimism of Schopenhauer, see Bowen, Modern Philosophy; Tulloch, Modern Theories, 169-221; Thompson, on Modern Pessimism, in Present Day Tracts, 6: no. 34; Wright, on Ecclesiastes, 141-216; Barlow, Ultimatum of Pessimism: Culture tends to misery; God is the most miserable of beings; creation is a plaster for the sore. See also Mark Hopkins, in Princeton Review, Sept. 1882:197—“Disorder and misery are so mingled with order and beneficence, that both optimism and pessimism are possible.” Yet it is evident that there must be more construction than destruction, or the world would not be existing. Buddhism, with its Nirvana-refuge, is essentially pessimistic. 3. To Christ as the Revealer of God. Since Christ is the Revealer of God in creation as well as in redemption, the remedy for pessimism is (1) the recognition of God’s transcendence—the universe at present not fully expressing his power, his holiness or his love, and nature being a scheme of progressive evolution which we imperfectly comprehend and in which there is much to follow; (2) the recognition of sin as the free act of the creature, by which all sorrow and pain have been caused, so that God is in no proper sense its author; (3) the recognition of Christ _for_ us on the Cross and Christ _in_ us by his Spirit, as revealing the age-long sorrow and suffering of God’s heart on account of human transgression, and as manifested, in self-sacrificing love, to deliver men from the manifold evils in which their sins have involved them; and (4) the recognition of present probation and future judgment, so that provision is made for removing the scandal now resting upon the divine government and for justifying the ways of God to men.