The difficulty of deciding between the various arrangements of the two chapters of Habakkuk does not, fortunately, prevent us from appreciating his argument. What he feels throughout (this is obvious, however you arrange his verses) is the tyranny of a great heathen power,[375] be it Assyrian, Egyptian or Chaldean. The prophet’s horizon is filled with wrong:[376] Israel thrown into disorder, revelation paralysed, justice perverted.[377] But, like Nahum, Habakkuk feels not for Israel alone. The Tyrant has outraged humanity.[378] He _sweeps peoples into his net_, and as soon as he empties this, he fills it again _ceaselessly_, as if there were no just God above. He exults in his vast cruelty, and has success so unbroken that he worships the very means of it. In itself such impiety is gross enough, but to a heart that believes in God it is a problem of exquisite pain. Habakkuk’s is the burden of the finest faith. He illustrates the great commonplace of religious doubt, that problems arise and become rigorous in proportion to the purity and tenderness of a man’s conception of God. It is not the coarsest but the finest temperaments which are exposed to scepticism. Every advance in assurance of God or in appreciation of His character develops new perplexities in face of the facts of experience, and faith becomes her own most cruel troubler. Habakkuk’s questions are not due to any cooling of the religious temper in Israel, but are begotten of the very heat and ardour of prophecy in its encounter with experience. His tremulousness, for instance, is impossible without the high knowledge of God’s purity and faithfulness, which older prophets had achieved in Israel:— _Art not Thou of old, O LORD, my God, my Holy One, Purer of eyes than to behold evil, And incapable of looking upon wrong?_ His despair is that which comes only from eager and persevering habits of prayer:— _How long, O LORD, have I called and Thou hearest not! I cry to Thee of wrong and Thou givest no help!_ His questions, too, are bold with that sense of God’s absolute power, which flashed so bright in Israel as to blind men’s eyes to all secondary and intermediate causes. _Thou_, he says,— _Thou hast made men like fishes of the sea, Like worms that have no ruler_,