Note 5 — Chapter XII · Strife.

Answers to such problems as these evolve themselves slowly but inevitably. The agonised cry of the poor girl in Browning’s poem—‘There may be heaven, there must be hell’—marks the direction in which necessity led human speculation many ages before her. A future had to be invented for the working out of the curse on Esau, who on earth had to fulfil his father’s blessing by enjoying power, wealth, and independence of his brother. In that future his greatness while living was repaid by his relegation to the desert and the rock with the he-goat for his support. Esau was believed to have been changed into a terrible hairy devil.5 But still there followed him in his phantasmal transformation a ghostly environment of his former power and greatness; the boldest and holiest could not afford to despise or set aside that ‘share’ which had been allotted him in the legend, and could not be wholly set aside in the invisible world.