If his poems be considered not in the abstract, but in the light of history, taking into account his mental pedigree and his intellectual surroundings, a more plausible explanation of his inconsistencies readily presents itself. In his youth, as we know, he sat at the feet of the Suni theologian Imam Muaffik, and he was then no doubt thoroughly indoctrinated with the great Semitic conception of the One God, or, to use the expressive term of Muhammadan theology, «the Only Real Agent» (_Fa' il i Hakiki_). To minds dominated by the overwhelming sense of Almighty Power, everywhere present and working, there seems no room for Nature, or human will, or chance, or any other Ahriman whatsoever, to take the responsibility of all the evils in the world, the storms and the earthquakes, the Borgias and the Catilines. The «Only Real Agent» has to answer for all. In the most ancient document of Semitic religious speculation now extant, the Book of Job, we find expostulations of the boldest character addressed to the Deity for permitting a righteous man to be stricken with unmerited misfortunes, though the writer ultimately concludes in a spirit of pious agnosticism and resignation to the inscrutable dispensations of Providence. In the Book of Ecclesiastes again, the same problems are handled, but in a somewhat different temper. The «weary king Ecclesiast» remarks that there is one event to all, to him that sacrificeth and him that sacrificeth not--that injustice and wrong seem eternally triumphant, that God has made things crooked, and none can make them straight; and concludes now in favour of a sober «_carpe diem_» philosophy, now in favour of a devout «fear of the Lord.» Of course the manner in which the serious Hebrew handles these matters is very different from the levity and flippancy of the volatile Persian, but it can hardly be denied that the Ecclesiast and Omar resemble one another in the double and contradictory nature of their practical conclusions. No sooner was Islam established than the same problem of the existence of evil in the handiwork of the Almighty Author and Governor of all began to trouble the Moslem theologians, and by their elaboration of the doctrine of Predestination they managed to aggravate its difficulties.