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obviously, Job had no miraculous and supernatural revelation of the will of God. He moved and lived and had his being outside the charmed and sacred circle in which such revela

tions were, or were supposed to be, vouchsafed. His one importunate complaint throughout the book is that he cannot see God, nor hear his voice, nor learn what his will and intention are. There is not a single reference in the Poem to the Hebrew law, to the Sacred Writings accredited by the Jews, or to the forms of life and worship which obtained among them. He is indebted for all that he knows of God to the great primitive Tradition, to the inherited and slowly developed conceptions of the human mind. And, on the other hand, it is equally obvious that he had a pure and noble morality, hardly inferior to that taught by Christ Himself. The tumultuous agitation and excitement of his spirit under the trials to which he was exposed, prove him to be very man; and his own description of the temptations which he had successfully encountered (cf. Chap. xxxi.) shews that he was open to the very influences by which men in all ages have been turned from righteousness. And yet no one can read the Poem without feeling throughout that he is brought into contact with a man of a singularly pure, high, and noble soul; his own delineation of himself (Chaps. xxix. and xxxi.) shews him to have been a masterpiece of human goodness, with "a daily beauty in his life" up to the level of most men's exceptional and heroic moments and Jehovah Himself is represented as pronouncing him what we feel him to be, "a perfect man and an upright, one that feareth God and escheweth evil."

In his case, then, the conditions on which modern scepticism builds its hopes for the race were fulfilled without a supernatural revelation, he was nevertheless possessed of a morality as pure and high as can well be conceived. He ought, therefore, on this hypothesis, not only to have been content, but to have felt that he was infinitely better off than if a Divine Revelation had been added to the pure and unimpaired treasure of his morality. Was he content with his treasure, then? did he feel that it met and satisfied every craving of his spirit? On the contrary, his whole soul goes

forth in a piercing cry for the very Revelation which our modern sceptics pronounce utterly superfluous. What they would contemptuously "abandon" he passionately craves and insists upon. He is tortured by the very longing which they assure us it was impossible he should ever experience, and knew no rest until he saw for himself the God of whom he had heard with the hearing of the ear, and in the light of that great Revelation learned how "vile" he was.

For purposes of study the Poem is most conveniently divided into nine parts: (1) The Proem, or Prologue, in which the Problem about to be discussed is stated: Chapters i. and ii. (2) The Curse pronounced by Job on his Day-the occasion from which the discussion springs up: Chapter iii. (3) The First Colloquy of the great Argument: Chapters iv.xiv. (4) The Second Colloquy: Chapters xv.-xxi. (5) The Third Colloquy: Chapters xxii.-xxvi. (6) The Soliloquy of Job: Chapters xxvii.-xxxi. (7) The Intervention of Elihu: Chapters xxxii.-xxxvii. (8) The Theophany, or the Intervention of Jehovah: Chapters xxxviii.-xlii. 6. And, (9) The Epilogue, in which the issue of this great controversy is recorded: Chapter xlii. 7-17.

SECTION I.

THE PROLOGUE.

CHAPTERS I AND II.

THE Book of Job has, as we have seen, a double purpose or intention. Its higher intention is to shew that God is capable of inspiring, by shewing that man is capable of cherishing, that genuine and disinterested affection which is the very soul of goodness: this is the fact which Satan challenges and which Jehovah undertakes to prove. Its second, but hardly secondary, intention is like unto the first, viz., to shew that, while the goodness of which man is capable has a natural tendency, under the rule and providence of a righteous God, to secure for him a full measure of temporal prosperity and happiness, it is nevertheless independent of such a reward, that it can dispense with it; or, in other words, that man is capable of loving right simply because it is right, and of hating wrong purely because it is wrong, even though he should not gain by it, but lose. In this aspect of it, the Poem is an emphatic condemnation of the "utilitarian" theory of morals, which assumes that men follow after that which is good only because they find goodness to be profitable for all the uses of this present world; an emphatic condemnation also of that religious selfishness which cannot do good hoping for nothing again, but demands its "pour-boire" for every act of duty, if not in this world, at least in that which is to come.

At the outset Job is placed before us as the model of a perfect man, "the very paragon of his age," "without his peer in all the earth." His outward conditions are large and prosperous: he has seven sons and three daughters, who seem to have been not unworthy of even such a father as he, and

are united to each other, and to him, by a singularly close and cordial attachment. He is not a nomad, but a settled and wealthy landed proprietor, with a vast estate and immense possessions, and he is recognized as "the greatest of the Sons of the East," probably, that is, as the wisest and noblest, as well as the wealthiest, man of his age. So far he presents that combination of personal goodness with happy outward conditions which the ancients regarded as the normal and invariable result of the righteous rule of God. Such a combination, however, was sure to give rise, sooner or later, to the suspicion that the goodness which had prosperity for its result might also have it for its motive; that the righteousness even of the best of men might prove to be only a subtle and refined selfishness. That this question might be raised in its most searching and crucial form, and answered in a manner the most complete, authoritative, final, it is carried up into heaven where alone the profound mysteries of life can be adequately handled; and it is argued out-nay, fought out there. A fallen angel, a " son of God," who has sunk from his first estate, challenges the reality of human goodness: "Is it for nought that Job fears God? Is not his piety simply a matter of profit and loss? Does he not do right only for the gain he may get thereby? Take away the gain, and what will become of his goodness?" Confident in the sincerity of his servant Job, assured that he at least is not one of those

Who, trimm'd in forms and visages of duty,

Keep yet their hearts attending on themselves,

Jehovah accepts the challenge. He consents that Job shall be stripped of all that he has; that all his gains shall be taken from him, and only his goodness left. Nor need any man question either the justice or the kindness of God in exposing him to what seems so cruel an experiment. The path of danger is the path of honour. Could Job have known, as Jehovah did know, that he was being put to the proof in order both that all the hierarchy of heaven might be convinced of man's capacity for a sincere and genuine piety, and that all subsequent generations of men, looking back on the trial of his faith, might find it pregnant with incentives to courage,

and patience, and hope-could he have foreseen this "end of the Lord," we may be very sure he would have rejoiced that he was counted worthy to suffer for an end so large and so noble.

That, however, he did not, and could not, know. Nevertheless "he endured," and entered into the blessedness of the man who, when tried, is found constant. Deprived of flocks and herds, his faithful servants and his loving children, in a single day; deprived of them with a suddenness and in forms which would inevitably mark him out as a man" smitten of God and afflicted," he nevertheless retained his integrity, and possessed his soul in patience. So far from renouncing God because his gains were gone,

and all

That made him happy at one stroke was taken

For ever from the world,

he fell on his face before Him and worshipped Him. The Adversary has only one device left; for, among other features which distinguish the "Adversary" of this Poem from the "Satan" of later inspired authors is the fact that he is represented as using only outward means, that he has no recourse to those inward spiritual suggestions by which we are most keenly tempted; these are left to the wife of Job and his friends. Job has lost much, but not all: his health remains, and, with his health, the possibility of recovering what he has lost. Of this too, therefore, Satan seeks, and is permitted, to despoil him. He smites Job with the most loathsome and monstrous form of disease known among men, a form, too, which was universally regarded as the revenge taken by an insulted Heaven on some heinous and enormous sin. And now, in the fullest and extremest sense, Job is stripped of all that he had gained by loving and serving God; nay, and even to his own mind, he is stripped of it by the very hand of God Himself. Nevertheless, he submits without a murmur, and shews himself as ready to accept evil from the hand of the Lord as good. His very wife turns upon him, and counsels him to utter the exact words which Satan had flattered himself that he could wring from his lips (comp. Chap. i. 11, final clause, with final clause of Chap. ii. 9). And, still, Job sinned

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