light very small. When the LORD pauses for his answer, he has no word to say. No claim more of merit and a triumphant cause; no clamor for explanation; all has melted away in reverence and humility, being absorbed in the one blessed consciousness that God is no more a hearsay but a seen reality.

Section

"I had heard of Thee by the hearing of the ear,

xxix. 9-12.

But now mine eye seeth Thee;

Wherefore I loathe me and repent

In dust and ashes."

Thus Job meets the test with that worship which is at once rapture and pain; takes his place, so to say, with submission and self-abnegation, in the sum of God's creatures, content to fulfill his part with the rest.1 This is his vindication: to go on, with enlightened eyes and chastened spirit. It is altogether in keeping that in this vision, so profound in its influence, self is lost, and reverent, trustful, penitent love abides.

1 In the long train of creative works by which the Lord teaches Job of Himself and His ways, we are reminded of Milton's reflections in the Sonnet on his Blindness:

"His state

Is kingly; thousands at his bidding speed,

And post o'er land and ocean without rest."

Nor is the lesson that Milton draws for his own conduct dissimilar to the submissive attitude here taken by Job:

"Who best

Bear His mild yoke, they serve Him best."

What, now, has become of that problem which most interpreters have taken

How the

as the central theme of the Book of Job-problem,

Job," the mystery of God's providential government of men?" In denying to it the supreme significance,

as generally

propounded, See above,

is answered.

p. 11.

it would be temerity, not to say blindness, so to insult the critical mind of the ages as to banish it altogether. Nor does Job himself ignore it. Has he not asked virtually the same question?

And all this time, though he knew it not, he has been living the answer. The grand conclusion, the sum total, is expressed not in words but in life: "Now mine eye seeth Thee." Need one whose eyes are opened by such a hard schooling ask why it was given? The answer is self-evident. Less than such stern discipline would not have produced such beauty and strength of human character. Less than such severe chastening would not have quickened Job's vision to see how subtly selfish motives may work to impair the friendships and the wisdom of earth, and how sufficing is the refuge provided in the eternal Love

beyond this life.

And the answer thus em

bodied in the patriarch's experience is a worldanswer, pointing to that mystery of travail and suffering which everywhere underlies the deepest insight, the highest achievements. Shall we ask why God invades our ease and scourges us onward and upward to the table-lands of vision? The new horizon and the purer air and the stronger muscles are the sufficient reason. "The spirit of man is an instrument which cannot give out its deepest, finest tones, except under the immediate hand of the Divine Harmonist."

The Epilogue, section xxx.

Then comes the Epilogue. Job is commended; prays for his friends, who are forgiven at his intercession; is restored to health and double prosperity. The friends were righteous for the sake of worldly good; Job was righteous for the sake of God. At the end of his long quest he found God and worldly good too; the greater brought with it the less. Some think his restoration is an artistic blemish; that it would have been a nobler ending if he had been left suffering. It would be a blemish if this paltry reward were the end which Job sought, and for which the poem existed. But the quest has already reached its supreme end in the vision and restored favor of God; this is merely

its incidental addition. And at least the old poet has put God and prosperity in the right relative places, in remarkable anticipation of the precept," Seek ye first the kingdom of God and His righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you."

IV.

IV. Considerations re

garding its origin.

A poem's

One more inquiry remains, the inquiry as to its origin. What must have been the age, and what the nation, out of which such a book could grow? What general vogue of thinking could have environed such colossal thought? Genius may indeed be a mighty tree, growing from an unseen germ to be the one commanding object of the plain; but it is rooted in the same soil that nourishes the shrubs at its feet. A great work of literature both feeds its age and is relation to fed by it. What the book returns, in transmuted and vitalized form, to its generation is what it has already gathered out of the hopes and needs and problems that surround it. Not that the highest literature is merely the echo of the people's surging thought, and no more; we cannot say this of Tennyson and Browning and Whittier and Emerson to-day: it is rather the utterance of those who, making the universal cause their

its age.

own, stand nearest the light, and bring the people's inarticulate longings to expression. The poets of an age, when they let their open and genuine hearts speak, are its truest seers. In them we hear, not one man alone, but the vast body of the time, pervaded by a spirit of hope or doubt or inquiry; a spirit voiceless, until the Æolian strings of the poet's heart feel and answer to its breathings; a spirit unguided, until the seer's own disciplined and originative personality conducts it to its dimly sought rest. This is the truth to-day, and has been ever since we could first trace the connection of literature with history; may we not say that something like it was equally a truth twentysix centuries ago? And when this Book of Job comes home to the general spirto be sought itual need as freshly as if it had been written to meet the maladies of this nineteenth Christian century, may we not say that its involution is equal to its evolution, and that there was a great heart of the people in that old time, out of which the book grew and to which it thrilled responsive, as it does to ours?

Such relation

for Job.

Yet when by external tests we endeavor to Difficulty of fix its age, we find the book very baffling. Generations of scholars have ransacked the ten centuries from Moses to

determining

its age.