Short Studies on Great Subjects

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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,
becoming shocked at his obstinacy, and disappointed 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 violent, 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 innocence, 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 thrusts 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 the mist rises from before his
eyes. 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 casualties 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? 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. Job 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--gives it in what
Aristotle calls an [Greek: 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 brows, 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 even 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 falsehood, which in
the calmer outset they would have blushed to think of. They _know_ no
evil of Job, but they do not hesitate 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 arises 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 paragraph from the eleventh to the
twenty-third verses is in direct contradiction to all which he has
maintained before--is, 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. Eichorn 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 bruised reed, and it had run into his hand and pierced him.
But as soon as in the speeches of his friend 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 the truth. 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 mystery, 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; the wisdom which alone
is attainable 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.[K] 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.'

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.[L]
And then comes (perhaps, as Ewald says, it _could not_ have come
before) the answer out of the whirlwind. Job had called on God, and
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 AEgyptian 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.

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
misfortunes, 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
Job's integrity proved; and there is no reason why the general law
should be interfered with, which, however large the exceptions, tends to
connect goodness and prosperity; 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 to 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 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' be
meant that the good man cares only to continue good, desiring nothing
more, then it is a true and noble saying. 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 it 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.

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