OF all the many perplexing problems with which humanity is brought face to face, one of the most puzzling is its own seemingly inexplicable nature. It is perfectly clear, to all who think, that opposite? cannot dwell together, and yet from his cradle to his grave that which is regarded by the many as man is, and ever has been, a bundle of arrant contradictions. He has shown himself capable of the nobleness and affection of a saint, and the meanness and malice of a devil. His breadth and generosity have been matched by his narrowness and bigotry, his genuineness and piety by his hypocrisy and cant, his wisdom and prudence by his folly and indiscretion, his tenderness and patience by his irritability and selfish complaint.
When one remembers that these antipodal characteristics are found not only in the genus homo, but (more or less markedly) in the make-up of every individual, and that the resulting sense of things enters into all history and literature, all philosophy and creeds, every product of human thought, it is not difficult to perceive that this fact alone would account in large part for the confusions and conflicts of the world, the apparent insolubility of the riddle of mortal life.
Moreover, our thought of man has always shaped in no small degree our thought of God. This is disclosed not only in the theology of unchristian peoples like the Babylonians, the Egyptians, the Greeks, etc., whose gods were little more than men and women of colossal mold and jealously assertive power, but it entered more or less into the deific concepts of the Hebrew race, was embodied in their religious literature, and has greatly influenced most of those who have held this literature in veneration. These incongruous ideas about the Supreme Being have, in turn, always reacted unfavorably upon human ideals and conduct, and thus affected every movement and shaped in some degree every judgment and every doing of men.
