THE BOOK OF JOB

The question will one day be asked, how it has been

that, in spite of the high pretensions of us English to a

superior reverence for the Bible, we have done so little

in comparison with our continental contemporaries

towards arriving at a proper understanding of it? The

books named below * form but a section of a long list

which has appeared in the last few years on the Book of

Job alone; and this book has not received any larger

share of attention than the others, either of the Old or

the New Testament. Whatever be the nature or the

origin of these books, (and on this point there is much

difference of opinion among the Germans as among

ourselves,) they are all agreed, orthodox and unorthodox,

that at least we should endeavour to understand them;

and that no efforts can be too great, either of research

or criticism, to discover their history, or elucidate their

meaning.

____

* I. Die poetischen Bucher des Alten Bundes. Erklart von

Heinrich Ewald. Gottingen: bei Vanderhoeck und Ruprecht.

1836.

2. Kurzgefasstes exegetisches Handbuck zum Alten Testament.

Zweite Lieferund. Hiob Von Ludwig Hirzel. Zweite Auflage,

durchgesehen von Dr. Justus Olshausen. Leipzig. 1852.

3. Quaestionum in Jobeidos locos vexatos Specimen. Von D.

Hermannus Hupfeld. Halis Saxonum. 1853.

____

We shall assent, doubtless, eagerly, perhaps noisily

and indignantly, to so obvious a truism; but our own

efforts in the same direction will not bear us out. The

able men in England employ themselves in matters of a

more practical character; and while we refuse to avail

ourselves of what has been done elsewhere, no book,

or books, which we produce on the interpretation of

Scripture acquire more than a partial or an ephemeral

reputation. The most important contribution to our

knowledge on this subject which has been made in

these recent years, is the translation of the "Library

of the Fathers," by which it is about as rational to

suppose that the analytical criticism of modern times

can be superseded, as that the place of Herman and

Dindoff could be supplied by an edition of the old

scholiasts.

It is, indeed, reasonable that, as long as we are

persuaded that our English theory of the Bible, as a whole,

is the right one, we should shrink from contact with

investigations, which, however ingenious in themselves,

are based on what we know to be a false foundation.

But there are some learned Germans whose orthodoxy

would pass examination at Exeter Hail; and there are

many subjects, such, for instance, as the present, on

which all their able men are agreed in conclusions that

cannot rationally give offence to any one. For the

Book of Job, analytical criticism has only served to clear

up the uncertainties which have hitherto always hung

about it. It is now considered to be, beyond all doubt,

a genuine Hebrew-original, completed by its writer

almost in the form in which it now remains to us. The

questions on the authenticity of the Prologue and

Epilogue, which once were thought important, have given

way before a more sound conception of the dramatic

unity of the entire poem; and the volumes before us

contain merely an inquiry into its meaning, bringing, at

the same time, all the resources of modern scholarship

and historical and mythological research to bear upon

the obscurity of separate passages. It is the most difficult

of all the Hebrew compositions--many words occurring

in it, and many thoughts, not to be found elsewhere in

the Bible. How difficult our translators found it may be

seen by the number of words which they were obliged

to insert in italics, and the doubtful renderings which

they have suggested in the margin. One instance of

this, in passing, we will notice in this place--it will be

familiar to everyone as the passage quoted at the opening

of the English burial service, and adduced as one of

the doctrinal proofs of the resurrection of the body: "I

know that my Redeemer liveth, and that He shall stand

at the latter day upon the earth; and though, after my

skin worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh I shall see

God." So this passage stands in the ordinary version.

But the words in italics have nothing answering to

them in the original--they were all added by the

translators to fill out their interpretation; and for in

my flesh, they tell us themselves in the margin that we

may read (and, in fact, we ought to read, and must read)

"out of," or "without" my flesh. It is but to write

out the verses omitting the conjectural additions, and

making that one small, but vital correction, to see how

frail a support is there for so large a conclusion; "I

know that my Redeemer liveth, and shall stand at the

latter... upon the earth; and after my skin...

destroy this...; yet without my flesh I shall see

God." If there is any doctrine of a resurrection here,

it is a resurrection precisely not of the body, but of the

spirit. And now let us only add that the word translated

Redeemer is the technical expression for the

"avenger of blood"; and that the second paragraph

ought to be rendered--"and one to come after me (my

next of kin, to whom the avenging my injuries belongs)

shall stand upon my dust," and we shall see how much

was to be done towards the mere exegesis of the text.

This is an extreme instance, and no one will question

the general beauty and majesty of our translation; but

there are many mythical and physical allusions scattered

over the poem, which, in the sixteenth century, there

were positively no means of understanding; and perhaps,

too, there were mental tendencies in the translators

themselves which prevented them from adequately

apprehending even the drift and spirit of it. The form

of the story was too stringent to allow such tendencies

any latitude; but they appear, from time to time,

sufficiently to produce serious confusion. With these

recent assistances, therefore, we propose to say something

of the nature of this extraordinary book--a

book of which it is to say little to call it unequalled

of its kind, and which will, one day, perhaps, when it

is allowed to stand on its own merits, be seen towering

up alone, far away above all the poetry of the

world. How it found its way into the Canon, smiting as

it does through and through the most deeply-seated

Jewish prejudices, is the chief difficulty about it now;

to be explained only by a traditional acceptance among

the sacred books, dating back from the old times of the

national greatness, when the minds of the people were

hewn in a larger type than was to be found among

the pharisees of the great synagogue. But its authorship,

its date, and its history, are alike a mystery to

us; it existed at the time when the Canon was composed;

and this is all that we know beyond what we

can gather out of the language and the contents of the

poem itself.

Before going further, however, we must make room

for a few remarks of a very general kind. Let it have

been written when it would, it marks a period in which

the religious convictions of thinking men were passing

through a vast crisis; and we shall not understand it

without having before us clearly something of the

conditions which periods of such a kind always and

necessarily exhibit.

The history of religious speculation appears in extreme

outline to have been of the following kind. We

may conceive mankind to have been originally launched

into the universe with no knowledge either of themselves

or of the scene in which they were placed; with

no actual knowledge, but distinguished from the rest

of the creation by a faculty of gaining knowledge;

and first unconsciously, and afterwards consciously and

laboriously, to have commenced that long series of

experience and observation which has accumulated in

thousands of years to what we now see around us.

Limited on all sides by conditions which they must

have felt to be none of their own imposing, and finding

everywhere forces working, over which they had no

control, the fear which they would naturally entertain

of these invisible and mighty agents, assumed, under

the direction of an idea which we may perhaps call

inborn and inherent in human nature, a more generous

character of reverence and awe. The laws of the outer

world, as they discovered them, they regarded as the

decrees, or as the immediate energies of personal beings;

and as knowledge grew up among them, they looked

upon it not as knowledge of nature, but of God, or the

gods. All early paganism appears, on careful examination,

to have arisen out of a consecration of the first

rudiments of physical or speculative science. The

twelve labours of Hercules are the labours of the sun,

of which Hercules is an old name, through the twelve

signs. Chronos, or time, being measured by the apparent

motion of the heavens, is figured as their child;

Time, the universal parent, devours its own offspring,

yet is again itself in the high faith of a human soul,

conscious of its power and its endurance, supposed to

be baffled and dethroned by Zeus, or life; and so on

through all the elaborate theogonies of Greece and

Egypt. They are no more than real insight into real

phenomena, allegorized as time went on, elaborated by

fancy, or idealized by imagination, but never losing

their original character.

Thus paganism, in its very nature, was expansive,

self-developing, and, as Mr. Hume observed, tolerant;

a new god was welcomed to the Pantheon as a new

scientific discovery is welcomed by the Royal Society;

and the various nations found no difficulty in interchanging

their divinities--a new god either representing

a new power not hitherto discovered, or one with which

they were already familiar under a new name. With

such a power of adaptation and enlargement, if there had

been nothing more in it than this, such a system might

have gone on accommodating itself to the change of

times, and keeping pace with the growth of human

character. Already in its later forms, as the unity of

nature was more clearly observed, and the identity of

it throughout the known world, the separate powers

were subordinating themselves to a single supreme

king; and, as the poets had originally personified the

elemental forces, the thinkers were reversing the earlier

process, and discovering the law under the person.

Happily or unhappily, however, what they could do

for themselves they could not do for the multitude.

Phoebus and Aphrodite had been made too human to

be allegorized. Humanized, and yet, we may say,

only half-humanized, retaining their purely physical

nature, and without any proper moral attribute at

all, these gods and goddesses remained, to the many,

examples of sensuality made beautiful; and, as soon

as right and wrong came to have a meaning, it was

impossible to worship any more these idealized

despisers of it. The human caprices and passions

which served at first to deepen the illusion, justly

revenged themselves. Paganism became a lie, and

perished.

In the meantime, the Jews (and perhaps some other

nations, but the Jews chiefly and principally) had been

moving forward along a road wholly different. Breaking

early away from the gods of nature, they advanced along

the line of their moral consciousness; and leaving the

nations to study physics, philosophy, and art, they

confined themselves to man and to human life. Their

theology grew up round the knowledge of good and

evil, and God, with them, was the supreme Lord of the

world, who stood towards man in the relation of a ruler

and a judge. Holding such a faith, to them the toleration

of paganism was an impossibility; the laws of

nature might be many, but the law of conduct was one;

there was one law and one king; and the conditions

under which He governed the world, as embodied in the

Decalogue or other similar code, were looked upon as

iron and inflexible certainties, unalterable revelations

of the will of an unalterable Being. So far there was

little in common between this process and the other;

but it was identical with it in this one important

feature, that moral knowledge, like physical, admitted

of degrees; and the successive steps of it were only

purchaseable by experience. The dispensation of the

law, in the language of modern theology, was not the

dispensation of grace, and the nature of good and evil

disclosed itself slowly as men were able to comprehend

it. Thus, no system of law or articles of belief were or

could be complete and exhaustive for all time. Experience

accumulates; new facts are observed, new forces

display themselves, and all such formulae must necessarily

be from period to period broken up and moulded

afresh. And yet the steps already gained are a treasure

so sacred, so liable are they at all times to be attacked

by those lower and baser elements in our nature which

it is their business to hold in check, that the better pan

of mankind have at all times practically regarded their

creed as a sacred total to which nothing may be added,

and from which nothing may be taken away; the suggestion

of a new idea is resented as an encroachment,

punished as an insidious piece of treason, and resisted

by the combined forces of all common practical understandings,

which know too well the value of what they

have, to risk the venture upon untried change. Periods

of religious transition, therefore, when the advance has

been a real one, always have been violent, and probably

will always continue to be so. They to whom the precious

gift of fresh light has been given are called upon

to exhibit their credentials as teachers in suffering for it.

They, and those who oppose them, have alike a sacred

cause; and the fearful spectacle arises of earnest,

vehement men, contending against each other as for their

own souls, in fiery struggle. Persecutions come, and

martyrdoms, and religious wars; and, at last, the old

faith, like the phoenix, expires upon its altar, and the

new rises out of the ashes.

Such, in briefest outline, has been the history of

religions, natural and moral; the first, indeed, being in

no proper sense a religion at all, as we understand

religion; and only assuming the character of it in the

minds of great men whose moral sense had raised them

beyond their time and country, and who, feeling the

necessity of a real creed, with an effort and with

indifferent success, endeavoured to express, under the

systems which they found, emotions which had no

proper place there.

Of the transition periods which we have described

as taking place under the religion which we call moral,

the first known to us is marked at its opening by the

appearance of the Book of Job, the first fierce collision

of the new fact with the formula which will not stretch

to cover it.

The earliest phenomenon likely to be observed connected

with the moral government of the world is the

general one, that on the whole, as things are constituted,

good men prosper and are happy, bad men fail and are

miserable. The cause of such a condition is no mystery,

and lies very near the surface. As soon as men combine

in society, they are forced to obey certain laws under

which alone society is possible, and these laws, even in

their rudest form, approach the laws of conscience. To

a certain extent, every one is obliged to sacrifice his

private inclinations; and those who refuse to do so are

punished, or are crushed. If society were perfect, the

imperfect tendency would carry itself out till the two

sets of laws were identical; but perfection so far has

been only in Utopia, and as far as we can judge by

experience hitherto, they have approximated most

nearly in the simplest and most rudimentary forms of

life. Under the systems which we call patriarchal, the

modern distinctions between sins and crimes had no

existence. All gross sins were offences against society,

as it then was constituted, and, wherever it was possible,

were punished as being so; chicanery and those subtle

advantages which the acute and unscrupulous can take

over the simple, without open breach of enacted statutes,

were only possible under the complications of more

artificial polities; and the oppression or injury of man

by man was open, violent, obvious, and therefore easily

understood. Doubtless, therefore, in such a state of

things, it would, on the whole, be true to experience,

that, judging merely by outward prosperity or the

reverse, good and bad men would be rewarded and

punished as such in this actual world; so far, that is,

as the administration of such rewards and punishments

was left in the power of mankind. But theology could

not content itself with general tendencies. Theological

propositions then, as much as now, were held to be

absolute, universal, admitting of no exceptions, and

explaining every phenomenon. Superficial generalizations

were construed into immutable decrees; the God

of this world was just and righteous, and temporal

prosperity or wretchedness were dealt out by him

immediately by his own will to his subjects, according

to their behaviour. Thus the same disposition towards

completeness which was the ruin of paganism, here, too,

was found generating the same evils; the half truth

rounding itself out with falsehoods. Not only the

consequence of ill actions which followed through

themselves, but the accidents, as we call them, of nature,

earthquakes, storms, and pestilences, were the ministers

of God's justice, and struck sinners only with

discriminating accuracy. That the sun should shine alike

on the evil and the good was a creed too high for the

early divines, or that the victims of a fallen tower were

no greater offenders than their neighbours. The

conceptions of such men could not pass beyond the

outward temporal consequence; and, if God's hand was not

there it was nowhere. We might have expected that

such a theory of things could not long resist the

accumulated contradictions of experience; but the same

experience shows also what a marvellous power is in us

of thrusting aside phenomena which interfere with our

cherished convictions; and when such convictions are

consecrated into a creed which it is a sacred duty to

believe, experience is but like water dropping upon a

rock, which wears it away, indeed, at last, but only in

thousands of years. This theory was and is the central

idea of the Jewish polity, the obstinate toughness of

which has been the perplexity of Gentiles and Christians

from the first dawn of its existence; it lingers among

ourselves in our Liturgy and in the popular belief; and

in spite of the emphatic censure of Him after whose

name we call ourselves, is still the instant interpreter

for us of any unusual calamity, a potato blight, a famine,

or an epidemic: such vitality is there in a moral faith,

though now, at any rate, contradicted by the experience

of all mankind, and at issue even with Christianity

itself.

At what period in the world's history misgivings about

it began to show themselves it is now impossible to

say; it was at the close, probably, of the patriarchal

period, when men who really thought must have found

it palpably shaking under them. Indications of such

misgivings are to be found in the Psalms, those especially

passing under the name of Asaph; and all through

Ecclesiastes there breathes a spirit of deepest and

saddest scepticism. But Asaph thrusts his doubts aside,

and forces himself back into his old position; and the

scepticism of Ecclesiastes is confessedly that of a man

who had gone wandering after enjoyment; searching

after pleasures--pleasures of sense and pleasures of

intellect--and who, at last, bears reluctant testimony

that, by such methods, no pleasures can be found which

will endure; that he had squandered the power which

might have been used for better things, and had only

strength remaining to tell his own sad tale as a warning

to mankind. There is nothing in Ecclesiastes like the

misgivings of a noble nature. The writer's own personal

happiness had been all for which he had cared; he had

failed, as all men gifted as he was gifted are sure to

fail, and the lights of heaven had been extinguished

by the disappointment with which his own spirit was

clouded.

Utterly different from these, both in character and

in the lesson which it teaches, is the Book of Job. Of

unknown date, as we said, and unknown authorship, the

language impregnated with strange idioms and strange

allusions, unjewish in form, and in fiercest hostility with

Judaism, it hovers like a meteor over the old Hebrew

literature, in it, but not of it, compelling the

acknowledgment of itself by its own internal majesty, yet

exerting no influence over the minds of the people,

never alluded to, and scarcely ever quoted, till at last

the light which it had heralded rose up full over the

world in Christianity.

The conjectures which have been formed upon the

date of it are so various, that they show of themselves

on how slight a foundation the best of them must

rest. The language is no guide, for although unquestionably

of Hebrew origin, it bears no analogy to any of the

other books in the Bible; while, of its external history,

nothing is known at all, except that it was received into

the Canon at the time of the great synagogue. Ewald

decides, with some confidence, that it belongs to the

great prophetic period, and that the writer was a

contemporary of Jeremiah. Ewald is a high authority

in these matters, and this opinion is the one which

we believe is now commonly received among biblical

scholars. In the absence of proof, however, (and the

reasons which he brings forward are really no more than

conjectures) these opposite considerations may be of

moment. It is only natural that at first thought we

should ascribe the grandest poem in a literature to the

time at which the poetry of the nation to which it

belongs was generally at its best: but, on reflection,

the time when the poetry of prophecy is the richest, is

not likely to be favourable to compositions of another

kind. The prophets wrote in an era of decrepitude,

dissolution, sin, and shame, when the glory of Israel

was filling round them into ruin, and their mission,

glowing as they were with the ancient spirit, was to

rebuke, to warn, to threaten, and to promise. Finding

themselves too late to save, and only, like Cassandra,

despised and disregarded, their voices rise up singing

the swan song of a dying people, now falling away in

the wild wailing of despondency over the shameful and

desperate present, now swelling in triumphant hope

that God will not leave them forever, and in his own

time will take his chosen to himself again. But such a

period is an ill-occasion for searching into the broad

problems of human destiny; the present is all-important

and all-absorbing; and such a book as that of Job

could have arisen only out of an isolation of mind, and

life, and interest, which we cannot conceive of as

possible.

The more it is studied, the more the conclusion

forces itself upon us that, let the writer have lived when

he would, in his struggle with the central falsehood of

his own people's creed, he must have divorced himself

from them outwardly as well as inwardly; that he

travelled away into the world, and lived long, perhaps

all his matured life, in exile. Everything about the

book speaks of a person who had broken free from

the narrow littleness of "the peculiar people." The

language, as we said, is full of strange words. The

hero of the poem is of strange land and parentage, a

Gentile certainly, not a Jew. The life, the manners,

the customs, are of all varieties and places--Egypt,

with its river and its pyramids, is there; the description

of mining points to Phoenicia; the settled life in cities,

the nomad Arabs, the wandering caravans, the heat of

the tropics, and the ice of the north, all are foreign to

Canaan, speaking of foreign things and foreign people.

No mention, or hint of mention, is there throughout

the poem, of Jewish traditions or Jewish certainties.

We look to find the three friends vindicate themselves,

as they so well might have done, by appeals to the

fertile annals of Israel, to the Flood, to the cities of the

plain, to the plagues of Egypt, or the thunders of Sinai.

But of all this there is not a word; they are passed by

as if they had no existence; and instead of them, when

witnesses are required for the power of God, we have

strange un-Hebrew stories of the eastern astronomic

mythology, the old wars of the giants, the imprisoned

Orion, the wounded dragon, "the sweet influences of

the seven stars," and the glittering fragments of the

sea-snake Rahab trailing across the northern sky.

Again, God is not the God of Israel, but the father of

mankind; we hear nothing of a chosen people, nothing

of a special revelation, nothing of peculiar privileges;

and in the court of heaven there is a Satan, not the

prince of this world and the enemy of God, but the

angel of judgment, the accusing spirit whose mission

was to walk to and fro over the earth, and carry up to

heaven an account of the sins of mankind. We cannot

believe that thoughts of this kind arose out of Jerusalem

in the days of Josiah. In this book, if anywhere, we

have the record of some aner polutropos who, like the

old hero of Ithaca,

pollon anthropon iden astea kai voon egno

polla d' hog'en tonto tathen algea hon kata thumon,

arnumenos psuchen

but the scenes, the names, and the incidents, are all

contrived as if to baffle curiosity, as if, in the very form

of the poem, to teach us that it is no story of a single

thing which happened once, but that it belongs to

humanity itself, and is the drama of the trial of man,

with Almighty God and the angels as the spectators

of it.

No reader can have failed to have been struck with

the simplicity of the opening. Still, calm, and most

majestic, it tells us everything which is necessary to be

known in the fewest possible words. The history of

Job was probably a tradition in the east; his name, like

that of Priam in Greece, the symbol of fallen greatness,

and his misfortunes the problem of philosophers. In

keeping with the current belief, he is described as a

model of excellence, the most perfect and upright man

upon the earth, "and the same was the greatest man in

all the east." So far, greatness and goodness had gone

hand in hand together, as the popular theory required.

The details of his character are brought out in the

progress of the poem. He was "the father of the

oppressed, and of those who had none to help them."

When he sat as a judge in the market-places,

"righteousness clothed him" there, and "his justice was

a robe and a diadem." He "broke the jaws of the

wicked and plucked the spoil out of his teeth;" and,

humble in the midst of his power, he "did not despise

the cause of his manservant, or his maidservant, when

they contended with him," knowing (and amidst those

old people where the multitude of mankind were

regarded as the born slaves of the powerful, to be carved

into eunuchs or polluted into concubines at their

master's pleasure, it was no easy matter to know it)

knowing "that He who had made him had made

them," and one "had fashioned them both in the

womb." Above all, he was the friend of the poor,

"the blessing of him that was ready to perish came

upon him," and he "made the widow's heart to sing

for joy."

Setting these characteristics of his daily life by the

side of his unaffected piety, as it is described in the first

chapter, we have a picture of the best man who could

then be conceived; not a hard ascetic, living in haughty

or cowardly isolation, but a warm figure of flesh and

blood, a man full of all human loveliness, and to whom,

that no room might be left for any possible Calvinistic

falsehood, God himself bears the emphatic testimony,

"that there was none like him upon the earth, a perfect

and upright man, who feared God and eschewed evil."

If such a person as this, therefore, could be made

miserable, necessarily the current belief of the Jews

was false to the root; and tradition furnished the fact

that he had been visited by every worst calamity.

How was it then to be accounted for? Out of a thousand

possible explanations, the poet introduces a single

one. He admits us behind the veil which covers the

ways of Providence, and we hear the accusing angel

charging Job with an interested piety, and of being

obedient because it was his policy. "Job does not

serve God for nought," he says; "strip him of his

splendour, and see if he will care for God then.

Humble him into poverty and wretchedness, so only

we shall know what is in his heart." The cause thus

introduced is itself a rebuke to the belief which, with

its "rewards and punishments," immediately fostered

selfishness; and the poem opens with a double action,

on one side to try the question whether it is possible for

man to love God disinterestedly--the issue of which

trial is not foreseen or even foretold, and we watch the

progress of it with an anxious and fearful interest--on

the other side, to bring out in contrast to the truth

which we already know, the cruel falsehood of the

popular faith, to show how, instead of leading men to

mercy and affection, it hardens their heart, narrows their

sympathies, and enhances the trials of the sufferer, by

refinements which even Satan had not anticipated. The

combination of evils, as blow falls on blow, suddenly,

swiftly, and terribly, has all the appearance of a purposed

visitation (as indeed it was;) if ever outward incidents

might with justice be interpreted as the immediate

action of Providence, those which fell on Job might be

so interpreted. The world turns disdainfully from the

fallen in the world's way; but far worse than this, his

chosen friends, wise, good, pious men, as wisdom and

piety were then, without one glimpse of the true cause

of his sufferings, see in them a judgment upon his secret

sins. He becomes to them an illustration, and even

(such are the paralogisms of men of this description) a

proof of their theory "that the prosperity of the wicked

is but for a while;" and instead of the comfort and help

which they might have brought him, and which in the

end they were made to bring him, he is to them no

more than a text for the enunciation of solemn falsehood.

And even worse again, the sufferer himself had been

educated in the same creed; he, too, had been taught

to see the hand of God in the outward dispensation;

and feeling from the bottom of his heart, that he, in

his own case, was a sure contradiction of what he had

learnt to believe, he himself finds his very faith in God

shaken from its foundation. The worst evils which

Satan had devised were distanced far by those which

had been created by human folly.

The creed in which Job had believed was tried and

found wanting, and, as it ever will be when the facts of

experience come in contact with the inadequate formula,

the true is found so mingled with the false, that they

can hardly be disentangled, and are in danger of being

swept away together.

A studied respect is shown, however, to this orthodoxy;

even while it is arraigned for judgment. It may be

doubtful whether the writer purposely intended it. He

probably cared only to tell the real truth; to say for

it the best which could be said, and to produce as its

defenders the best and wisest men whom in his experience

he had known to believe and defend it. At any

rate, he represents the three friends, not as a weaker

person would have represented them, as foolish, obstinate

bigots, but as wise, humane, and almost great men,

who, at the outset, at least, are animated only by the

kindest feelings, and speak what they have to say with

the most earnest conviction that it is true. Job is

vehement, desperate, reckless. His language is the

wild, natural outpouring of suffering. The friends, true

to the eternal nature of man, are grave, solemn, and

indignant, preaching their half truth, and mistaken only

in supposing that it is the whole; speaking, as all such

persons would speak, and still do speak, in defending

what they consider sacred truth, against the assaults

of folly and scepticism. How beautiful is their first

introduction:--

"Now when Job's three friends heard of all this evil

which was come upon him, they came every one from his

own place, Eliphaz the Temanite, and Bildad the Shuhite,

and Zophar the Naamathite, for they had made an appointment

together to come to mourn with him and to comfort

him. And when they lifted up their eyes afar off and knew

him not, they lifted up their voices and wept, and they

rent every one his mantle, and sprinkled dust upon their

heads towards heaven. So they sate down with him upon

the ground seven days and seven nights, and none spake a

word unto him, for they saw that his grief was very great."

What a picture is there! What majestic tenderness!

His wife had scoffed at his faith, bidding him leave

"God and die." His acquaintance had turned from

him. He "had called his servant, and he had given him

no answer." Even the children in their unconscious

cruelty had gathered round and mocked him, as he lay

among the ashes. But "his friends sprinkle dust towards

heaven, and sit silently by him, and weep for him seven

days and seven nights upon the ground." That is, they

were true hearted, truly loving, devout, religious men,

and yet they with their religion, were to become the

instruments of the most poignant sufferings, and the

sharpest temptations, which he had to endure. So it

was, and is, and will be,--of such materials is this human

life of ours composed.

And now, remembering the double action of the

drama, the actual trial of Job, the result of which is

uncertain, and the delusion of these men which is, at

the outset, certain, let us go rapidly through the dialogue.

Satan's share in the temptation had already been overcome.

Lying sick in the loathsome disease which had

been sent upon him, his wife, in Satan's own words, had

tempted Job, to say, "Farewell to God," think no more

of God or goodness, since this was all which came of it;

and Job had told her, that she spoke as one of the

foolish women. He "had received good at the hand of

the Lord, and should he not receive evil?" But now,

when real love and real affection appear, his heart melts

in him; he loses his forced self-composure, and bursts

into a passionate regret that he had ever been born.

In the agony of his sufferings, hope of better things had

died away. He does not complain of injustice; as yet,

and before his friends have stung and wounded him, he

makes no questioning of Providence,--but why was life

given to him at all, if only for this? And sick in mind

and sick in body, but one wish remains to him, that

death will come quickly and end all. It is a cry from

the very depths of a single and simple heart. But for

such simplicity and singleness his friends could not give

him credit; possessed beforehand with their idea, they

see in his misery only a fatal witness against him; such

calamities could not have befallen a man, the justice of

God would not have permitted it, unless they had been

deserved. Job had sinned and he had suffered, and

this wild passion was but impenitence and rebellion.

Being as certain that they were right in this opinion

as they were that God Himself existed, that they should

speak what they felt was only natural and necessary;

and their language at the outset is all which would be

dictated by the tenderest sympathy. Eliphaz opens,

the oldest and most important of the three, in a soft,

subdued, suggestive strain, contriving in every way to

spare the feelings of the sufferer, to the extreme, to

which his real love will allow him. All is general,

impersonal, indirect, the rule of the world, the order of

Providence. He does not accuse Job, but he describes

his calamities, and leaves him to gather for himself the

occasion which had produced them, and then passes

off, as if further to soften the blow, to the mysterious

vision in which the infirmity of mortal nature had been

revealed to him, the universal weakness which involved

both the certainty that Job had shared in it, and the

excuse for him, if he would confess and humble himself:

the blessed virtue of repentance follows, and the

promise that all shall be well.

This is the note on which each of the friends strikes

successively, in the first of the three divisions into

which the dialogue divides itself, but each with

increasing peremptoriness and confidence, as Job, so far from

accepting their interpretation of what had befallen him,

hurls it from him in anger and disdain. Let us observe

(what the Calvinists make of it they have given us no

means of knowing,) he will hear as little of the charges

against mankind, as of charges against himself. He will

not listen to the "corruption of humanity," because in

the consciousness of his own innocency, he knows that

it is not corrupt: he knows it, and we know it, the

divine sentence upon him having been already passed.

He will not acknowledge his sin, he cannot repent, for

he knows not of what to repent. If he could have

reflected calmly, he might have foreseen what they

would say. He knew all that as well as they: it was

the old story which he had learnt, and could repeat, if

necessary, as well as any one: and if it had been no

more than a philosophical discussion, touching himself

no more nearly than it touched his friends, he might

have allowed for the tenacity of opinion in such matters,

and listened to it and replied to it with equanimity.

But as the proverb says, "it is ill-talking between a full

man and a fasting:" and in him such equanimity would

have been but Stoicism or the affectation of it, and

unreal as the others' theories. Possessed with the

certainty that he had not deserved what had befallen

him, harassed with doubt, and worn out with pain and

unkindness, he had assumed (and how natural that he

should assume it), that those who loved him would not

have been hasty to believe evil of him, that he had

been safe in speaking to them as he really felt, and that

he might look to them for something warmer and more

sympathizing than such dreary eloquence. So when the

revelation comes upon him of what was passing in them,

he attributes it (and now he is unjust to them) to a

falsehood of heart, and not to a blindness of under-

standing. Their sermons, so kindly intended, roll past

him as a dismal mockery. They had been shocked

(and how true again is this to nature) at his passionate

cry for death. "Do ye reprove words?" he says,

"and the speeches of one that is desperate, which

are as wind?" It was but poor friendship and narrow

wisdom. He had looked to them for pity, for comfort,

and love. He had longed for it as the parched caravans

in the desert for the water-streams, and "his brethren

had dealt deceitfully with him," as the brooks, which

in the cool winter roll in a full turbid stream; "what

time it waxes warm they vanish, when it is hot they are

consumed out of their place. The caravans of Tema

looked for them, the companies of Sheba waited for

them. They were confounded because they had hoped.

They came thither and there was nothing." If for once

these poor men could have trusted their hearts, if for

once they could have believed that there might be

"more things in heaven and earth" than were dreamt

of in their philosophy--but this is the one thing which

they could not do, which the theologian proper never

has done or will do. And thus whatever of calmness or

endurance, Job alone, on his ash-heap, might have

conquered for himself, is all scattered away; and as the

strong gusts of passion sweep to and fro across his heart,

he pours himself out in wild fitful music, so beautiful

because so true, not answering them or their speeches,

but now flinging them from him in scorn, now appealing

to their mercy, or turning indignantly to God; now

praying for death; now in perplexity doubting whether,

in some mystic way which he cannot understand, he

may not, perhaps after all, really have sinned, and

praying to be shown it; and, then, staggering further into

the darkness, and breaking out into upbraidings of the

Power which has become so dreadful an enigma to him.

"Thou inquirest after my iniquity, thou searchest after

my sin, and thou knowest that I am not wicked. Why

didst thou bring me forth out of the womb? Oh, that

I had given up the ghost, and no eye had seen me.

Cease, let me alone. It is but a little while that I have

to live. Let me alone, that I may take comfort a little

before I go, whence I shall not return to the land of

darkness and the shadow of death." In what other

poem in the world is there pathos so deep as this?

With experience so stern as his, it was not for Job to

be calm, and self-possessed, and delicate in his words.

He speaks not what he knows, but what he feels; and

without fear the writer allows him to throw it out all

genuine as it rises, not overmuch caring how nice ears

might be offended, but contented to be true to the real

emotion of a genuine human heart. So the poem runs

on to the end of the first answer to Zophar.

But now with admirable fitness, as the contest goes

forward, the relative position of the speakers begins to

change. Hitherto Job only had been passionate; and

his friends temperate and collected. Now, however,

shocked at his obstinacy, and disappointed wholly in

the result of their homilies, they stray still further from

the truth in an endeavour to strengthen their position,

and, as a natural consequence, visibly grow angry. To

them Job's vehement and desperate speeches are

damning evidence of the truth of their suspicion. Impiety

is added to his first sin, and they begin to see in him

a rebel against God. At first they had been contented

to speak generally; and much which they had urged

was partially true: now they step forward to a direct

application, and formally and personally accuse himself.

Here their ground is positively false; and with

delicate art it is they who are now growing passionate,

and wounded self-love begins to show behind their zeal

For God; while in contrast to them, as there is less

and less truth in what they say, Job grows more and

more collected. For a time it had seemed doubtful

how he would endure his trial. The light of his faith

was burning feebly and unsteadily; a little more and

it seemed as if it might have utterly gone out; but at

last the storm was lulling; as the charges are brought

personally home to him, the confidence in his own real

innocence rises against them. He had before known

that he was innocent, now he feels the strength which

lies in it, as if God were beginning to reveal Himself

within him, to prepare the way for the after outward

manifestation of Himself.

The friends, as before, repeat one another with but

little difference; the sameness being of course

intentional, as showing that they were not speaking for

themselves, but as representatives of a prevailing opinion.

Eliphaz, again, gives the note which the others follow.

Hear this Calvinist of the old world. "Thy own mouth

condemneth thee, and thine own lips testify against thee.

What is man that he should be clean, and he that is

born of a woman that he should be righteous? Behold,

he putteth no trust in his saints. Yea, the heavens are

not clean in his sight; how much more abominable

and filthy is man, which drinketh iniquity like water?"

Strange, that after all these thousands of years, we

should still persist in this degrading confession, as a

thing which it is impious to deny, and impious to

attempt to render otherwise, when scripture itself, in

language so emphatic, declares that it is a lie. Job is

innocent, perfect, righteous. God Himself bears witness

to it. It is Job who is found at last to have spoken

truth, and the friends to have sinned in denying it.

And he holds fast by his innocency, and with a generous

confidence puts away the misgivings which had begun

to cling to him. Among his complainings he had

exclaimed, that God was remembering upon him the

sins of his youth--not denying them--knowing well,

that he, like others, had gone astray before he had

learnt to control himself, but feeling that at least in an

earthly father it is unjust to visit the faults of childhood

on the matured man; feeling that he had long, long

shaken them off from him, and they did not even

impair the probity of his after life. But now these

doubts, too, pass away in the brave certainty that God

is not less just than man. As the denouncings grow

louder and darker, he appeals from his narrow judges to

the Supreme Tribunal, calls on God to hear him and to

try his cause--and, then, in the strength of this appeal

his eye grows clearer still. His sickness is mortal: he

has no hope in life, and death is near, but the intense

feeling that justice must and will be done, holds to him

closer and closer. God may appear on earth for him;

or if that be too bold a hope, and death finds him as he

is--what is death, then? God will clear his memory

in the place where he lived; his injuries will be righted

over his grave; while for himself, like a sudden gleam of

sunlight between clouds, a clear, bright hope beams up,

that he too, then, in another life, if not in this, when his

skin is wasted off his bones, and the worms have done

their work on the prison of his spirit, he, too, at last

may then see God; may see Him, and have his pleadings heard.

With such a hope, or even the shadow of one, he

turns back to the world again to look at it. Facts

against which he had before closed his eyes he allows

and confronts, and he sees that his own little experience

is but the reflection of a law. You tell me, he seems to

say, that the good are rewarded, and that the wicked

are punished, that God is just, and that this is always

so. Perhaps it is, or will be, but not in the way which

you imagine. You have known me, you have known

what my life has been; you see what I am, and it is no

difficulty to you. You prefer believing that I, whom

you call your friend, am a deceiver or a pretender,

to admitting the possibility of the falsehood of your

hypothesis. You will not listen to my assurance, and

you are angry with me because I will not lie against

my own soul, and acknowledge sins which I have not

committed. You appeal to the course of the world in

proof of your faith, and challenge me to answer you.

Well, then, I accept your challenge. The world is not

what you say. You have told me what you have seen

of it. I will tell you what I have seen.

"Even while I remember I am afraid, and trembling

taketh hold upon my flesh. Wherefore do the wicked

become old, yea, and are mighty in power. Their seed

is established in their sight with them, and their offspring

before their eyes. Their houses are safe from fear, neither

is the rod of God upon them. Their bull gendereth and

faileth not; their cow calveth and casteth not her calf.

They send forth their little ones like a flock, and their

children dance. They take the timbrel and harp, and rejoice

at the sound of the organ. They spend their days in wealth,

and in a moment go down into the grave. Therefore they

say unto God, Depart from us, for we desire not the knowledge

of thy ways. What is the Almighty that we should

serve him? and what profit should we have if we pray to

him?"

Will you quote the weary proverb? Will you say

that "God layeth up his iniquity for his children?"

(our translators have wholly lost the sense of this

passage, and endeavour to make Job acknowledge

what he is steadfastly denying). Well, and what

then? What will he care? "Will his own eye see

his own fall? Will he drink the wrath of the

Almighty? What are the fortunes of his house to

him if the number of his own months is fulfilled?"

One man is good and another wicked, one is happy

and another is miserable. In the great indifference of

nature they share alike in the common lot. "They

lie down alike in the dust, and the worms cover them."

Ewald, and many other critics, suppose that Job was

hurried away by his feelings to say all this; and that

in his calmer moments he must have felt that it was

untrue. It is a point on which we must decline

accepting even Ewald's high authority. Even then

in those old times it was beginning to be terribly true.

Even then the current theory was obliged to bend to

large exceptions; and what Job saw as exceptions we

see round us everywhere. It was true then, it is

infinitely more true now, that what is called virtue in

the common sense of the word, still more that nobleness,

godliness, or heroism of character in any form

whatsoever, have nothing to do with this or that man's

prosperity, or even happiness. The thoroughly vicious

man is no doubt wretched enough; but the worldly,

prudent, self-restraining man, with his five senses,

which he understands how to gratify with tempered

indulgence, with a conscience satisfied with the hack

routine of what is called respectability, such a man

feels no wretchedness; no inward uneasiness disturbs

him, no desires which he cannot gratify; and this though

he be the basest and most contemptible slave of his

own selfishness. Providence will not interfere to punish

him. Let him obey the laws under which prosperity

is obtainable, and he will obtain it; let him never fear

He will obtain it, be he base or noble. Nature is

indifferent; the famine, and the earthquake, and the

blight, or the accident, will not discriminate to strike

him. He may insure himself against those in these

days of ours: with the money perhaps which a better

man would have given away, and he will have his

reward. He need not doubt it.

And again, it is not true, as optimists would persuade

us, that such prosperity brings no real pleasure.

A man with no high aspirations who thrives and makes

money, and envelops himself in comforts, is as happy

as such a nature can be. If unbroken satisfaction

be the most blessed state for a man (and this certainly

is the practical notion of happiness) he is the happiest

of men. Nor are those idle phrases any truer, that

the good man's goodness is a never-ceasing sunshine;

that virtue is its own reward. &c. &c. If men truly

virtuous care to be rewarded for it, their virtue is but

a poor investment of their moral capital. Was Job

so happy then on that ash-heap of his, the mark of the

world's scorn, and the butt for the spiritual archery

of the theologian, alone in his forlorn nakedness, like

some old dreary stump which the lightning has scathed,

rotting away in the wind and the rain? Happy! if

happiness be indeed what we men are sent into this

world to seek for, those hitherto thought the noblest

among us were the pitifullest and wretchedest. Surely

it was no error in Job. It was that real insight which

once was given to all the world in Christianity;

however we have forgotten it now. He was learning to

see that it was not in the possession of enjoyment,

no, nor of happiness itself, that the difference lies

between the good and the bad. True, it might be

that God sometimes, even generally, gives such happiness

in, gives it as what Aristotle calls an epigignomenon

telos, but it is no part of the terms on which He admits

us to His service, still less is it the end which we may

propose to ourselves on entering His service. Happiness

He gives to whom He will, or leaves to the angel

of nature to distribute among those who fulfil the laws

upon which it depends. But to serve God and to

love Him is higher and better than happiness, though

it be with wounded feet, and bleeding brow, and hearts

loaded with sorrow. Into this high faith Job is rising,

treading his temptations under his feet, and finding

in them a ladder on which his spirit rises. Thus he

is passing further and ever further from his friends,

soaring where their imaginations cannot follow him.

To them he is a blasphemer whom they gaze at with

awe and terror. They had charged him with sinning,

on the strength of their hypothesis, and he has answered

with a deliberate denial of it. Losing now all mastery

over themselves, they pour out a torrent of mere

extravagant invective and baseless falsehoods, which

in the calmer outset they would have blushed to think

of. They know no evil of Job, but they do not hesitate

now to convert conjecture into certainty, and specify

in detail the particular crimes which he must have

committed. He ought to have committed them, and

so he had; the old argument then as now.--"Is not

thy wickedness great?" says Eliphaz. "Thou hast

taken a pledge from thy brother for nought, and

stripped the naked of their clothing; thou hast not

given water to the weary, and thou hast withholden

bread from the hungry;" and so on through a series

of mere distracted lies. But the time was past when

words like these could make Job angry. Bildad follows

them up with an attempt to frighten him by a picture

of the power of that God whom he was blaspheming;

but Job cuts short his harangue, and ends it for him

in a spirit of loftiness which Bildad could not have

approached; and then proudly and calmly rebukes

them all, no longer in scorn and irony, but in high

tranquil self-possession. "God forbid that I should

justify you," he says; "till I die I will not remove my

integrity from me. My righteousness I hold fast, and

will not let it go. My heart shall not reproach me

so long as I live."

So far all has been clear, each party, with increasing

confidence, having insisted on their own position, and

denounced their adversaries. A difficulty now rises,

which, at first sight, appears insurmountable. As the

chapters are at present printed, the entire of the

twenty-seventh is assigned to Job, and the verses from the

eleventh to the twenty-third are in direct contradiction

to all which he has maintained before, are, in fact, a

concession of having been wrong from the beginning.

Ewald, who, as we said above, himself refuses to allow

the truth of Job's last and highest position, supposes

that he is here receding from it, and confessing what an

over precipitate passion had betrayed him into denying.

For many reasons, principally because we are satisfied

that Job said then no more than the real fact, we cannot

think Ewald right; and the concessions are too large

and too inconsistent to be reconciled even with his own

general theory of the poem. Another solution of the

difficulty is very simple, although, it is to be admitted,

that it rather cuts the knot than unties it. Eliphaz and

Bildad have each spoken a third time; the symmetry

of the general form requires that now Zophar should

speak; and the suggestion, we believe, was first made by

Dr. Kennicott, that he did speak, and that the verses

in question belong to him. Any one who is accustomed

to MSS. will understand easily how such a mistake,--

if it be one,--might have arisen. Even in Shakespeare,

the speeches in the early editions are, in many instances,

wrongly divided, and assigned to the wrong persons.

It might have arisen from inadvertence; it might have

arisen from the foolishness of some Jewish transcriber,

who resolved, at all costs, to drag the book into harmony

with Judaism, and make Job unsay his heresy.

This view has the merit of fully clearing up the obscurity;

another, however, has been suggested by Eichorn, who

originally followed Kennicott, but discovered, as he

supposed, a less violent hypothesis, which was equally

satisfactory. He imagines the verses to be a summary

by Job of his adversaries' opinions, as if he said--

"Listen now; you know what the facts are as well as

I, and yet you maintain this;" and then passed on with

his indirect reply to it. It is possible that Eichorn

may be right--at any rate, either he is right, or else

Dr. Kennicott is. Certainly, Ewald is not. Taken as

an account of Job's own conviction, the passage

contradicts the burden of the whole poem. Passing it by,

therefore, and going to what immediately follows, we

arrive at what, in a human sense, is the final climax--

Job's victory and triumph. He had appealed to God,

and God had not appeared; he had doubted and fought

against his doubts, and, at last, had crushed them down.

He, too, had been taught to look for God in outward

judgments; and when his own experience had shown

him his mistake, he knew not where to turn. He had

been leaning on a braised reed, and it had run into his

hand, and pierced him. But as soon as in the speeches

of his friends he saw it all laid down in its weakness and

its false conclusions--when he saw the defenders of it

wandering further and further from what he knew to

be true, growing every moment, as if from a consciousness

of the unsoundness of their standing ground, more

violent, obstinate, and unreasonable, the scales fell more

and more from his eyes--he had seen the fact that the

wicked might prosper, and in learning to depend upon

his innocency he had felt that the good man's support

was there, if it was anywhere; and at last, with all his

heart, was reconciled to it. The mystery of the outer

world becomes deeper to him, but he does not any

more try to understand it. The wisdom which can

compass that, he knows, is not in man; though man

search for it deeper and harder than the miner searches

for the hidden treasures of the earth; and the wisdom

which alone is possible to him, is resignation to

God.

"Where, he cries, shall wisdom be found, and where is

the place of understanding. Man knoweth not the price

thereof, neither is it found in the land of the living. The

depth said, it is not with me; and the sea said, it is not in

me. It is hid from the eyes of all living, and kept close from

the fowls of the air.* God understandeth the way thereof,

and He knoweth the place thereof [He, not man, understands

the mysteries of the world which He has made].

And unto man He said, Behold the fear of the Lord,

that is wisdom, and to depart from evil, that is understanding."

____

* An allusion, perhaps, to the old bird auguries. The birds, as the

inhabitants of the air, were supposed to be the messengers between

heaven and earth.

____

Here, therefore, it might seem as if all was over.

There is no clearer or purer faith possible for man; and

Job had achieved it. His evil had turned to good;

and sorrow had severed for him the last links which

bound him to lower things. He had felt that he could

do without happiness, that it was no longer essential,

and that he could live on, and still love God, and cling

to Him. But he is not described as of preternatural, or

at all Titanic nature, but as very man, full of all human

tenderness and susceptibility. His old life was still

beautiful to him. He does not hate it, because he can

renounce it; and now that the struggle is over, the

battle fought and won, and his heart has flowed over in

that magnificent song of victory, the note once more

changes: he turns back to earth, to linger over those

old departed days, with which the present is so hard a

contrast; and his parable dies away in a strain of

plaintive, but resigned melancholy. Once more he

throws himself on God, no longer in passionate

expostulation, but in pleading humility.+ And then comes

(perhaps, as Ewald says, it could not have come before)

the answer out of the whirlwind. Job had called on

Him had prayed that He might appear, that he might

plead his cause with Him; and now He comes, and

what will Job do? He comes not as the healing

spirit in the heart of man; but, as Job had at first

demanded, the outward God, the Almighty Creator of

the universe, and clad in the terrors and the glory of it.

Job, in his first precipitancy, had desired to reason with

Him on His government. The poet, in gleaming lines,

describes for an answer the universe as it then was

known, the majesty and awfulness of it; and then asks

whether it is this which he requires to have explained to

him, or which he believes himself capable of conducting.

The revelation acts on Job as the sign of the Macrocosmos

on the modern Faust; but when he sinks

crushed, it is not as the rebellious upstart, struck down

in his pride--for he had himself, partially at least,

subdued his own presumption--but as a humble penitent,

struggling to overcome his weakness. He abhors

himself for his murmurs, and "repents in dust and

ashes." It will have occurred to every one that the

secret which has been revealed to the reader is not, after

all, revealed to Job or to his friends, and for this plain

reason: the burden of the drama is not that we do, but

that we do not, and cannot, know the mystery of the

government of the world, that it is not for man to seek

it, or for God to reveal it. We, the readers, are, in this

one instance, admitted behind the scenes--for once, in

this single case because it was necessary to meet the

received theory by a positive fact, which contradicted it.

But the explanation of one case need not be the explanation

of another; our business is to do what we know

to be right, and ask no questions. The veil which in the

Egyptian legend lay before the face of Isis, is not to be

raised; and we are not to seek to penetrate secrets

which are not ours.

____

+ The speech of Elihu, which lies between Job's last words and

God's appearance, is now decisively pronounced by Hebrew scholars

not to be genuine. The most superficial reader will have been

perplexed by the introduction of a speaker to whom no allusion is

made, either in the prologue or the epilogue; by a long dissertation,

which adds nothing to the progress of the argument; proceeding

evidently on the false hypothesis of the three friends, and

betraying not the faintest conception of the real cause of Job's

suffering. And the suspicions which such an anomaly would naturally

suggest are now made certainties, by a fuller knowledge of the

language, and the detection of a different hand. The interpolator

has unconsciously confessed the feeling which allowed him to take

so great a liberty. He, too, possessed with the old Jew theory, was

unable to accept in its fulness so great a contradiction to it; and,

missing the spirit of the poem, he believed that God's honour could

still be vindicated in the old way. "His wrath was kindled" against

the friends, because they could not answer Job; and against Job

because he would not be answered; and conceiving himself "full

of matter," and "ready to burst like new bottles," he could not

contain himself, and delivered into the text a sermon on the Theodice,

such, we suppose, as formed the current doctrine of the time in

which he lived.

____

While, however, God does not condescend to justify

His ways to man, He gives judgment on the past

controversy. The self-constituted pleaders for Him, the

acceptors of His person, were all wrong; and Job, the

passionate, vehement, scornful, misbelieving Job, he

had spoken the truth; he at least had spoken facts, and

they had been defending a transient theory as an

everlasting truth.

"And it was so, that after the Lord had spoken these

words to Job, the Lord said to Eliphaz the Temanite, my

wrath is kindled against thee and against thy two friends;

for ye have not spoken of me the thing that is right, as my

servant Job hath. Therefore take unto you now seven

bullocks and seven rams, and go to my servant Job; and

offer for yourselves a burnt-offering. And my servant Job

shall pray for you, and him will I accept. Lest I deal with

you after your folly, for that ye have not spoken of me the

thing which is right, like my servant Job."

One act of justice remains. Knowing as we do, the

cause of Job's sufferings, and that as soon as his trial

was over, it was no longer operative, our sense of fitness

could not be satisfied unless he were indemnified outwardly

for his outward sufferings. Satan is defeated,

and his integrity proved; and there is no reason why

the general law should be interfered with, which makes

good men happy; or why obvious calamities, obviously

undeserved, should remain any more unremoved. Perhaps,

too, a deeper lesson still lies below his restoration

--something perhaps of this kind. Prosperity, enjoyment,

happiness, comfort, peace, whatever be the name

by which we designate that state in which life is to our

own selves pleasant and delightful, as long as they are

sought or prized as things essential, so far have a

tendency to disennoble our nature, and are a sign that

we are still in servitude and selfishness. Only when

they lie outside us, as ornaments merely to be worn or

laid aside as God pleases, only then may such things

be possessed with impunity. Job's heart in early times

had clung to them more than he knew, but now he was

purged clean, and they were restored because he had

ceased to need them.

Such in outline is this wonderful poem. With the

material of which it is woven we have not here been

concerned, although it is so rich and pregnant, that we

might with little difficulty construct out of it a

complete picture of the world as then it was: its life,

knowledge, arts, habits, superstitions, hopes, and fears.

The subject is the problem of all mankind, and the

composition embraces no less wide a range. But what we are

here most interested upon, is the epoch which it marks

in the progress of mankind, as the first recorded struggle

of a new experience with an established orthodox

belief. True, for hundreds of years, perhaps for a

thousand, the superstition against which it was directed

continued; when Christ came it was still in its vitality.

Nay, as we saw, it is alive, or in a sort of mock life,

among us at this very day. But even those who

retained their imperfect belief had received into their

canon a book which treated it with contumely and

scorn, so irresistible was the lofty majesty of truth.

In days like these, when we hear so much of progress,

it is worth while to ask ourselves, what advances

we have made further in the same direction? and once

more, at the risk of some repetition, let us look at the

position in which this book leaves us. It had been

assumed, that man if he lived a just and upright life,

had a right to expect to be happy. Happiness, "his

being's end and aim," was his legitimate and covenanted

reward. If God therefore was just, such a man would

be happy; and inasmuch as God was just, the man who

was not happy had not deserved to be. There is no

flaw in this argument; and if it is unsound, the fallacy

can only lie in the supposed right to happiness. It is

idle to talk of inward consolations. Job felt them, but

they were not everything. They did not relieve the

anguish of his wounds; they did not make the loss of

his children, or his friends' unkindness, any the less

painful to him.

The poet, indeed, restores him in the book; but in

life it need not have been so. He might have died upon

his ash-heap as thousands of good men have died, and

will die again in misery. Happiness, therefore, is not

what we are to look for. Our place is to be true to the

best which we know, to seek that and do that; and if

by "virtue its own reward" he meant that the good

man cares only to continue good, desiring nothing more;

then it is true and noble. But if virtue be valued,

because it is politic, because in pursuit of it will be

found most enjoyment and fewest sufferings, then it is

not noble any more, and it is turning the truth of God

into a lie. Let us do right, and whether happiness come

or unhappiness is no very mighty matter. If it come,

life will be sweet; if it do not come, life will be bitter

--bitter, not sweet, and yet to be borne. On such a

theory alone is the government of this world intelligibly

just. The well-being of our souls depends only on

what we are, and nobleness of character is nothing

else but steady love of good, and steady scorn of evil.

The government of the world is a problem while the

desire of selfish enjoyment survives, and when justice

is not done according to such standard (which will not

be till the day after doomsday, and not then), self-loving

men will still ask, why? and find no answer. Only to

those who have the heart to say, we can do without

that, it is not what we ask or desire, is there no secret.

Man will have what he deserves, and will find what is

really best for him, exactly as he honestly seeks for it.

Happiness may fly away, pleasure pall or cease to be

obtainable, wealth decay, friends fail or prove unkind,

and fame turn to infamy; but the power to serve God

never fails, and the love of Him is never rejected.

Most of us, at one time or other of our lives, have

known something of love--of that only pure love in

which no self is left remaining. We have loved as

children, we have loved as lovers; some of us have

learnt to love a cause, a faith, a country; and what love

would that be which existed only with a prudent view

to after-interests. Surely, there is a love which exults

in the power of self-abandonment, and can glory in the

privilege of suffering for what is good. Que mon nom

soit fletri, pourvu que la France soit libre, said Danton;

and those wild patriots who had trampled into scorn

the faith in an immortal life in which they would be

rewarded for what they were suffering, went to their

graves as beds, for the dream of a people's liberty.

Shall we, who would be thought reasonable men, love

the living God with less heart than these poor men

loved their phantom? Justice is done; the balance is

not deranged. It only seems deranged, as long as we

have not learnt to serve without looking to be paid

for it.

Such is the theory of life which is to be found in the

Book of Job; a faith which has flashed up in all times

and all lands, wherever noble men were to be found,

and which passed in Christianity into the acknowledged

creed of half the world. The cross was the new symbol,

the divine sufferer the great example, and mankind

answered to the call, because the appeal was not to

what was poor and selfish in them, but to whatever of

best and bravest was in their nature. The law of

reward and punishment was superseded by the law of love.

Thou shalt love God and thou shalt love man; and that

was not love--man knew it once--which was bought by

the prospect of reward. Times are changed with us

now. Thou shalt love God and thou shalt love man, in

the hands of a poor Paley, are found to mean no more

than, Thou shalt love thyself after an enlightened

manner. And the same base tone has saturated not

only our common feelings, but our Christian theologies

and our Antichristian philosophies. A prudent regard

to our future interests, an abstinence from present

unlawful pleasures, because they will entail the loss of

greater pleasure by-and-by, or perhaps be paid for with

pain, this is called virtue now; and the belief that such

beings as men can be influenced by any feelings nobler

or better, is smiled at as the dream of enthusiasts

whose hearts have outrun their understandings. Indeed,

he were but a poor lover whose devotion to his mistress

lay resting on the feeling that a marriage with her would

conduce to 'his own after comforts. That were a poor

patriot who served his country for the hire which his

country would give to him. And we should think but

poorly of a son who thus addressed his earthly father:

"Father, on whom my fortunes depend, teach me to

do what pleases thee, that I, obeying thee in all things

may obtain those good things which thou hast promised

to give to thy obedient children." If any of us who have

lived in so poor a faith venture, by-and-by, to put in

our claims, Satan will be likely to say of us (with better

reason than he did of Job) "Did they serve God for

nought, then? Take their reward from them, and they

will curse Him to His face." If Christianity had never

borne itself more nobly than this, do we suppose that

those fierce Norsemen who had learnt, in the fiery

warsongs of the Edda, of what stuff the hearts of heroes are

composed, would have fashioned their sword-hilts into

crosses, and themselves into a crusading chivalry? Let

us not dishonour our great fathers with the dream of it.

The Christians, like the stoics and the epicureans, would

have lived their little day among the ignoble sects of an

effete civilization, and would have passed off and been

heard of no more. It was in another spirit that those

first preachers of righteousness went out upon their

warfare with evil. They preached, not enlightened

prudence, but purity, justice, goodness; holding out no

promises in this world except of suffering as their great

master had suffered, and rejoicing that they were counted

worthy to suffer for His sake. And that crown of glory

which they did believe to await them in a life beyond

the grave, was no enjoyment of what they had surrendered

in life, was not enjoyment at all in any sense

which human thought or language can attach to the

words; as little like it as the crown of love is like it,

which the true lover looks for when at last he obtains

his mistress. It was to be with Christ--to lose

themselves in Him.

How all this nobleness ebbed away, and Christianity

became what we know it, we are partially beginning to

see. The living spirit organized for itself a body of

perishable flesh: not only the real gains of real

experience, but mere conjectural hypotheses current at the

day for the solution of unexplained phenomena, became

formulae and articles of faith; again, as before, the living

and the dead were bound together, and the seeds of

decay were already planted on the birth of a constructed

polity. But there was another cause allied to this, and

yet different from it, which, though a law of human

nature itself, seems now-a-days altogether forgotten. In

the rapid and steady advance of our knowledge of

material things, we are apt to believe that all our

knowledge follows the same law, that it is merely generalized

experience, that experience accumulates daily, and,

therefore, that "progress of the species," in all senses, is an

obvious and necessary fact. There is something which

is true in this view mixed with a great deal which is

false. Material knowledge, the physical and mechanical

sciences, make their way from step to step, from experiment

to experiment, and each advance is secured and

made good, and cannot again be lost; one generation

takes up the general sum of experience where the last

laid it down, adds to it what it has the opportunity of

adding, and leaves it with interest to the next. The

successive positions, as they are gained, require nothing

for the apprehension of them but an understanding

ordinarily cultivated. Prejudices have to be encountered,

but prejudices of opinion merely, not prejudices of

conscience or prejudices of self-love, like those which

beset our progress in the science of morality, Here we

enter upon conditions wholly different, conditions in

which age differs from age, man differs from man, and

even from himself, at different moments. We all have

experienced times when, as we say, we should not know

ourselves; some, when we fall below our average level;

some, when we are lifted above it, and put on, as it were,

a higher nature. At such intervals as these last,

(unfortunately, with most of us, of rare occurrence,) many

things become clear to us, which before were hard

sayings; propositions become alive which, usually, are

but dry words. Our hearts seem purer, our motives

loftier; our purposes, what we are proud to acknowledge

to ourselves. And, as man is unequal to himself, so

is man to his neighbour, and period to period. The

entire method of action, the theories of human life which

in one area prevail universally, to the next are

unpractical and insane, as those of this next would have seemed

mere baseness to the first, if the first could have

anticipated them. One, we may suppose, holds some "greatest

nobleness principle," the other some "greatest happiness

principle;" and then their very systems of axioms

will contradict one another; their general conceptions

and their detailed interpretations, their rules, judgments,

opinions, practices, will be in perpetual and endless

contradiction. Our minds take shape from our hearts,

and the facts of moral experience do not teach their own

meaning, but submit to many readings, according to the

power of eye which we bring with us.

The want of a clear perception of so important a

feature about us, leads to many singular contradictions.

A believer in popular Protestantism, who is also a

believer in progress, ought, if he were consistent, to

regard mankind as growing every day in a more

and more advantageous position with respect to the

trials of life; and yet if he were asked whether it is

easier for him to "save his soul" in the nineteenth

century than it would have been in the first or second,

or whether the said soul is necessarily better worth

saving, he would be perplexed for an answer. There

is hardly one of us who, in childhood, has not felt like

the Jews to whom Christ spoke, that if he had "lived

in the days of the fathers," if he had had their

advantages, he would have found duty a much easier matter;

and some of us in mature life have felt that, in old

Athens, or old republican Rome, in the first ages of

Christianity, in the Crusades or at the Reformation,

there was a contagious atmosphere of general nobleness,

in which we should have been less troubled with the

little feelings which cling about us now. At any rate,

it is at these rare epochs only that real additions are

made to our moral knowledge. At such times, new

truths are, indeed, sent down among us, and, for periods

longer or shorter, may be seen to exercise an ennobling

influence on mankind. Perhaps what is gained on

these occasions is never entirely lost. The historical

monuments of their effects are at least indestructible;

and, when the spirit which gave them birth reappears,

their dormant energy awakens again.

But it seems from our present experience of what,

in some at least of its modern forms, Christianity has

been capable of becoming, that there is no doctrine in

itself so pure, but what the poorer nature which is in

us can disarm and distort it, and adapt it to its own

littleness. The once living spirit dries up into formulae,

and formula whether of mass-sacrifice or vicarious

righteousness, or "reward and punishment," are

contrived ever so as to escape making over high demands

on men. Some aim at dispensing with obedience

altogether, and those which insist on obedience rest

the obligations of it on the poorest of motives. So

things go on till there is no life left at all; till, from

all higher aspirations we are lowered down to the love

of self after an enlightened manner; and then nothing

remains but to fight the battle over again. The once

beneficial truth has become, as in Job's case, a cruel

and mischievous deception, and the whole question of

life and its obligations must again be opened.

It is now some three centuries since the last of such

reopenings. If we ask ourselves how much during

this time has been actually added to the sum of our

knowledge in these matters, what--in all the thousands

upon thousands of sermons and theologies, and philosophies

with which Europe has been deluged--has been

gained for mankind beyond what we have found in this

very book of Job for instance; how far all this has

advanced us in the "progress of humanity," it were

hard, or rather it is easy to answer. How far we have

fallen below, let Paley and the rest bear witness; but

what moral question can be asked which admits now

of a nobler solution than was offered two, perhaps three

thousand years ago? The world has not been standing

still, experience of man and life has increased, questions

have multiplied on questions, while the answers of the

established teachers to them have been growing every

day more and more incredible. What other answers

have there been? Of all the countless books which

have appeared, there has been only one of enduring

importance, in which an attempt is made to carry on

the solution of the great problem. Job is given over

into Satan's hand to be tempted; and though he shakes

he does not fall. Taking the temptation of Job for his

model, Goethe has similarly exposed his Faust to trial,

and with him the tempter succeeds. His hero falls

from sin to sin, from crime to crime; he becomes a

seducer, a murderer, a betrayer, following recklessly

his evil angel wherever he chooses to lead him; and

yet, with all this, he never wholly forfeits our sympathy.

In spite of his weakness his heart is still true to his

higher nature; sick and restless, even in the delirium

of enjoyment, he always longs for something better, and

he never can be brought to say of evil that it is good.

And, therefore, after all, the devil is balked of his prey;

in virtue of this one fact, that the evil in which he

steeped himself remained to the last hateful to him,

Faust is saved by the angels ... And this indeed,

though Goethe has scarcely dealt with it satisfactorily,

is a vast subject. It will be eagerly answered for the

established belief, that such cases are its especial

province. All men are sinners, and it possesses the

blessed remedy for sin. But, among the countless

numbers of those characters so strangely mixed among

us, in which the dark and the bright fibres cross like

a meshwork; characters at one moment capable of

acts of heroic nobleness, at another, hurried by

temptation into actions which even common men may deplore,

how many are there who have never availed themselves

of the conditions of reconciliation as orthodoxy proffers

them, and of such men what is to be said? It was

said once of a sinner that to her "much was forgiven

for she loved much." But this is language which

theology has as little appropriated as the Jews could

appropriate the language of Job. It cannot recognise

the nobleness of the human heart. It has no balance

in which to weigh the good against the evil; and when

a great Burns, or a Mirabeau comes before it, it can

but tremblingly count up the offences committed, and

then, looking to the end, and finding its own terms

not to have been complied with, it faintly mutters its

anathema. Sin only it can apprehend and judge; and

for the poor acts of struggling heroism, "Forasmuch as

they were not done, &c., &c., it doubts not but they

have the nature of sin." [See the Thirteenth Article.]

Something of the difficulty has been met by Goethe,

but it cannot be said that he has resolved it; or at

least that he has furnished others with a solution which

may guide their judgment. In the writer of the Book

of Job there is an awful moral earnestness before which

we bend as in the presence of a superior being. The

orthodoxy against which he contended is not set aside

or denied; he sees what truth is in it; only he sees

more than it, and over it, and through it. But in

Goethe, who needed it more, inasmuch as his problem

was more delicate and difficult, the moral earnestness is

not awful, is not even high. We cannot feel that in

dealing with sin he entertains any great horror of it;

he looks on it as a mistake, as undesirable, but scarcely

as more. Goethe's great powers are of another kind;

and this particular question, though in appearance the

primary subject of the poem, is really only secondary.

In substance Faust is more like Ecclesiastes than it

is like Job, and describes rather the restlessness of a

largely-gifted nature which, missing the guidance of

the heart, plays experiments with life, trying knowledge,

pleasure, dissipation, one after another, and hating them

all; and then hating life itself as a weary, stale, flat,

unprofitable mockery. The temper exhibited here will

probably be perennial in the world. But the remedy

for it will scarcely be more clear under other circumstances

than it is at present, and lies in the disposition

of the heart, and not in any propositions which can

be addressed to the understanding. For that other

question how rightly to estimate a human being; what

constitutes a real vitiation of character, and how to

distinguish, without either denying the good or making

light of the evil; how to be just to the popular theories.

and yet not to blind ourselves to their shallowness and

injustice-that is a problem for us, for the solution of

which we are at present left to our ordinary instinct,

without any recognized guidance whatsoever.

Nor is this the only problem which is in the same

situation. There can scarcely be a more startling

contrast between fact and theory, than the conditions under

which practically positions of power and influence are

distributed among us, the theory of human worth which

the necessities of life oblige us to act upon and the

theory which we believe that we believe. As we look

around among our leading men, our statesmen, our

legislators, the judges on our bench, the commanders of

our armies, the men to whom this English nation commits

the conduct of its best interests, profane and

sacred, what do we see to be the principles which guide

our selection? How entirely do they lie beside and

beyond the negative tests? and how little respect do we

pay to the breach of this or that commandment in comparison

with ability? So wholly impossible is it to

apply the received opinions on such matters to practice,

to treat men known to be guilty of what theology calls

deadly sins, as really guilty of them, that it would

almost seem we had fallen into a moral anarchy; that

ability alone is what we regard, without any reference

at all, except in glaring and outrageous cases, to moral

disqualifications. It is invidious to mention names of

living men; it is worse than invidious to drag out of

their graves men who have gone down into them with

honour, to make a point for an argument. But we

know, all of us, that among the best servants of our

country, there have been, and there are many, whose

lives will not stand scrutiny by the negative tests, and

who do not appear very greatly to repent, or to have

repented of their sins according to recognized methods.

Once more, among our daily or weekly confessions,

which we are supposed to repeat as if we were all of us

at all times in precisely the same moral condition, we

are made to say that we have done those things which

we ought not to have done, and to have left undone

those things which we ought to have done. An earthly

father to whom his children were day after day to

make this acknowledgment would be apt to inquire

whether they were trying to do better, whether at any

rate they were endeavouring to learn; and if he were

told that although they had made some faint attempts

to understand the negative part of their duty, yet that

of the positive part, of those things which they ought

to do, they had no notions at all, and had no idea that

they were under obligation to form any, he would come

to rather strange conclusions about them. But really

and truly, what practical notions of duty have we

beyond that of abstaining from committing sins? Not

to commit sin, we suppose, covers but a small part of

what is expected of us. Through the entire tissue of

our employments there runs a good and a bad. Bishop

Butler tells us, for instance, that even of our time there

is a portion which is ours, and a portion which is our

neighbour's; and if we spend more of it on personal

interests than our own share, we are stealing. This

sounds strange doctrine; we prefer rather making vague

acknowledgments, and shrink from pursuing them into

detail. We say vaguely, that in all we do we should

consecrate ourselves to God, and our own lips condemn

us; for which among us cares to learn the way to do it.

The devoir of a knight was understood in the courts of

chivalry, the lives of heroic men, pagan and Christian,

were once held up before the world as patterns

of detailed imitation; and now, when such ideals are

wanted more than ever, Protestantism unhappily stands

with a drawn sword on the threshold of the inquiry,

and tells us that it is impious. The law has been fulfilled

for us in condescension to our inherent worthlessness,

and our business is to appropriate another's righteousness,

and not, like Titans, to be scaling Heaven

by profane efforts of our own. Protestants, we know

very well, will cry out in tones loud enough at such a

representation of their doctrines. But we know also,

that unless men may feel a cheerful conviction that they

can do right if they try, that they can purify themselves,

can live noble and worthy lives, unless this is set before

them as the thing which they are to do, and can succeed

in doing, they will not waste their energies on what they

know beforehand will end in failure, and if they may

not live for God they will live for themselves.

And all this while the whole complex frame of society

is a meshwork of duty woven of living fibre, and the

condition of its remaining sound is, that every thread of

it of its own free energy shall do what it ought. The

penalties of duties neglected are to the full as terrible

as those of sins committed; more terrible perhaps,

because more palpable and sure. A lord of the land,

or an employer of labour, supposes that he has no duty

except to keep what he calls the commandments in his

own person, to go to church, and to do what he will

with his own,--and Irish famines follow, and trade

strikes, and chartisms, and Paris revolutions. We look

for a remedy in impossible legislative enactments, and

there is but one remedy which will avail, that the thing

which we call public opinion learn something of the

meaning of human nobleness, and demand some approximation

to it. As things are we have no idea of

what a human being ought to be. After the first

rudimental conditions we pass at once into meaningless

generalities; and with no knowledge to guide our

judgment, we allow it to be guided by meaner principles;

we respect money, we respect rank, we respect ability--

character is as if it had no existence.

In the midst of this loud talk of progress, therefore,

in which so many of us at present are agreed to believe,

which is, indeed, the common meeting point of

all the thousand sects into which we are split, it is

with saddened feelings that we see so little of it in

so large a matter. Progress there is in knowledge;

and science has enabled the number of human

beings capable of existing upon this earth to be indefinitely

multiplied. But this is but a small triumph

if the ratio of the good and bad, the wise and the

foolish, the full and the hungry remains unaffected.

And we cheat ourselves with words when we conclude

out of our material splendour an advance of the race.

One fruit only our mother earth offers up with pride

to her maker--her human children made noble by their

life upon her; and how wildly on such matters we now

are wandering let this one instance serve to show. At

the moment at which we write, a series of letters are

appearing in the Times newspaper, letters evidently of

a man of ability, and endorsed in large type by the

authorities of Printing House Square, advocating the

establishment of a free Greek state with its centre at

Constantinople, on the ground that the Greek character

has at last achieved the qualities essential for the

formation of a great people, and that endued as it is with

the practical commercial spirit, and taking everywhere

rational views of life, there is no fear of a repetition

from it of the follies of the age of Pericles. We should

rather think there was not: and yet the writer speaks

without any appearance of irony, and is saying what

he obviously means.

In two things there is progress--progress in knowledge

of the outward world, and progress in material

wealth. This last, for the present, creates, perhaps,

more evils than it relieves; but suppose this difficulty

solved, suppose the wealth distributed, and every

peasant living like a peer--what then? If this is all,

one noble soul outweighs the whole of it. Let us follow

knowledge to the outer circle of the universe, the eye

will not be satisfied with seeing, nor the ear with hearing.

Let us build our streets of gold, and they will hide as

many aching hearts as hovels of straw. The well-being

of mankind is not advanced a single step. Knowledge

is power, and wealth is power; and harnessed, as in

Plato's fable, to the chariot of the soul, and guided

by wisdom, they may bear it through the circle of the

stars. But left to their own guidance, or reined by a

fool's hand, they may bring the poor fool to Phaeton's

end, and set a world on fire. One real service, and

perhaps only one, knowledge alone and by itself will

do for us--it can explode existing superstitions. Everything

has its appointed time, superstition like the rest;

and theologies, that they may not overlive the period

in which they can be of advantage to mankind, are

condemned, by the conditions of their being, to weave

a body for themselves out of the ideas of the age

of their birth; ideas which, by the advance of knowledge,

are seen to be imperfect or false. We cannot

any longer be told that there must be four inspired

gospels--neither more nor less--because there are

four winds and four elements. The chemists now

count some sixty elements, ultimately, as some of

them think, reducible into one; and the gospel, like

the wind, may blow from every point under heaven.

But effectual to destroy old superstitions, whether

it is equally successful in preventing others from

growing in their place, is less certain and obvious..

In these days of table-turnings, mesmerisms, spirit-

rappings, odyle fluids, and millenarian pamphlets selling

80,000 copies among our best-educated classes, we

must be allowed to doubt.

Our one efficient political science hinges on selfinterest,

and the uniform action of motives among the

masses of mankind--of selfish motives reducible to

system. Such philosophies and such sciences would

but poorly explain the rise of Christianity, of

Mahometanism, or of the Reformation. They belong to ages

of comparative poverty of heart, when the desires of

men are limited to material things; when men are

contented to labour, and eat the fruit of their labour, and

then lie down and die. While such symptoms remain

among us, our faith in progress may remain unshaken;

but it will be a faith which, as of old, is the substance

of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.

____