“A thousand years in my sight are but as yesterday when it is past. I will grant what you seek to prove; that Job has become mankind.” § 4 The dark regard of Satan smote down through the quivering universe and left the toiling light waves behind. “See there,” he said pointing. “My old friend on his little planet—Adam—Job—Man—like a roast on a spit. It is time we had another wager.” God condescended to look with Satan at mankind, circling between day and night. “Whether he will curse or bless?” “Whether he will even remember God.” “I have given my promise that I will at last restore Adam.” The downcast face smiled faintly. “These questions change from age to age,” said Satan. “The Whole remains the same.” “The story grows longer in either direction,” said Satan, speaking as one who thinks aloud; “past and future unfold together.... When the first atoms jarred I was there, and so conflict was there—and progress. The days of the old story have each expanded to hundreds of millions of years now, and still I am in them all. The sharks and crawling monsters of the early seas, the first things that crept out of the water into the jungle of fronds and stems, the early reptiles, the leaping and flying dragons of the great age of life, the mighty beasts of hoof and horn that came later; they all feared and suffered and were perplexed. At last came this Man of yours, out of the woods, hairy, beetle-browed and blood-stained, peering not too hopefully for that Eden-bower of the ancient story. It wasn’t there. There never had been a garden. He had fallen before he arose, and the weeds and thorns are as ancient as the flowers. The Fall goes back in time now beyond man, beyond the world, beyond imagination. The very stars were born in sin.... “If we can still call it sin,” mused Satan. “On a little planet this Thing arises, this red earth, this Adam, this Edomite, this Job. He builds cities, he tills the earth, he catches the lightning and makes a slave of it, he changes the breed of beast and grain. Clever things to do, but still petty things. You say that in some manner he is to come up at last to _this_.... He is too foolish and too weak. His achievements only illuminate his limitations. Look at his little brain boxed up from growth in a skull of bone! Look at his bag of a body full of rags and rudiments, a haggis of diseases! His life is decay.... _Does_ he grow? I do not see it. Has he made any perceptible step forward in quality in the last ten thousand years? He quarrels endlessly and aimlessly with himself.... In a little while his planet will cool and freeze.” “In the end he will rule over the stars,” said the voice that was above Satan. “My spirit is in him.” Satan shaded his face with his hand from the effulgence about him. He said no more for a time, but sat watching mankind as a boy might sit on the bank of a stream and watch the fry of minnows in the clear water of a shallow.