Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 13.djvu/733

JOB 699 commences the high debate which continues through thirty chapters of the book. The principle with which the three friends of Job came to the consideration of his history was the principle that calamity is the result of evil-doing, as on the other hand prosperity is the reward of righteousness. Suffering is not an accident or a spontaneous growth of the soil ; man is born unto trouble as the sparks fly upwards ; there is in human life a tendency to do evil which draws down upon men the chastisement of heaven (ch. v. 6). The form in which the principle is enunciated by Eliphaz, from whom the other speakers take their cue, is this : where there is suffering there has been sin in the sufferer, not necessarily deadly sin, though where the suffering is great the sin must have been heinous. Not suffering in itself, but the effect of it on the sufferer is what gives insight Into his true character. Suffering is not always punitive ; it is far ofteuer disciplinary, designed to wean the good man from his sin. If he sees in his suffering the monition of God and turns from his evil, his future shall be rich in peace and happiness, and his latter estate more prosperous than his first. If he murmurs or resists, he can only perish under the multiplying chastisements which his impenitence will provoke. N"ow this principle of the friends is far from being a peculiar crotchet of theirs ; its truth is undeniable, though they erred in supposing it a principle that would cover the wide providence of God. The principle is the fundamental idea of moral government, the expression of tine natural conscience, a principle common more or less to all peoples, though perhaps more prominent in the Semitic mind, because all religious ideas are more prominent and simple there, not suggested to Israel first by the law, but found and adopted by the law, though it may be sharpened by it. It is the fundamental principle of prophecy no less than of the law, and, if possible, of the wisdom or philosophy of the Hebrews more than of either. Speculation among the Hebrews had a simpler task before it than it had in the West or. in the further East. The Greek philosopher began his operations upon the sum of things ; he threw the universe into his crucible at once. His object was to effect some analysis of it, such an analysis that he could call one clement cause and another effect. Or, to vary the figure, his endeavour was to pursue the streams of tendency which he could observe upwards till he reached at last the central spring which sent them all forth. God, a single cause and explanation, was the object of his search. But to the Hebrew this was already found. The analysis resulting in the dis tinction of God and the world had been effected for him long ago, so long that the history and circumstances of the process had been forgotten, and only the unchallengeable result remained. His philosophy was not a quest of God whom he did not know, but a recognition on all hands of God whom he knew. The great primary idea to his mind was that of God, a Being wholly just, doing all. And the world was little more than the phenomena that revealed the mind and the presence and the operations of God. Consequently the nature of God as known to him and the course of events formed a perfect equation. The idea of what God was in Himself was in complete harmony with His manifestation of Himself in providence, in the events of human life, and the history of men and nations. The philosophy of the wise did not go behind the origin of sin, or referred it to the freedom of man; but, sin existing, and God being in immediate personal contact with the world, every event was a direct expression of His moral will and energy; calamity fell on wickedness, and success attended right-doing. This view of the moral harmony between the nature of God and the events of provi dence in the fortunes of men and nations is the view of the Hebrew wisdom in its oldest form, during what might be called the period of principles, to which belong Prov. x. sq. ; and this is the posi tion maintained by Job s three friends. And the significance of the book of Job in the history of revelation arises from this that it marks the point when such a view was definitively overcome, closing the long period when this principle was merely subjected to ques tionings, and makes a new positive addition to the doctrine of evil. Job agreed with the friends that afflictions came directly from the hand of God, and also that God afflicted those whom He held guilty of sins. But his conscience denied the imputation of guilt, whether insinuated by his friends or implied in God s chastisement of him. Hence ho was driven to conclude that God was unjust, that He sought occasions against him, and perverted his right. The position of Job appeared to his friends nothing else but impiety, as it came very near being ; while theirs was to him mere falsehood and the special pleading of sycophants in behalf of God because He was the stronger. Within these two iron walls the debate moves, making little progress, but with much brilliancy, if not of argument, of illustration. A certain advance indeed is perceptible. In the first series of speeches, ch. iv.-xiv., the key-note of which is struck by Eliphaz, the oldest and most considerate of the three, the position is that affliction is caused by sin, and is chastisement designed for the sinner s good; and the moral is that Job should recognize it and use it for the purpose for which it was sent. In the second, ch. xv.-xxi. , the other side of the picture is held up, the terrible fate of the sinner, and those brilliant pictures of a restored future, thrown in by all the speakers in the first scries, are absent. Job s demeanour under the consolations offered him afforded little hope of his repentance. In the third series, ch. xxii. sq. , the friends cast off all disguise, and openly charge Job with a course of evil life. That their armoury was now exhausted is shown by the brevity of the second speaker, and the failure of the third to answer in any form. In reply Job disdains for a time to touch what he well knew lay under all their exhortations ; he laments with touching pathos the defection of his friends on whom he counted, who were like the winter torrents looked for in vain by the perishing caravan in the summer heat ; he meets with bitter scorn their constant cry that Godwill not cast off the righteous man, by asking How one can be righteous with God ? what can human weakness, however inno cent, do against infinite might and subtlety ? they are righteous whom an omnipotent and perverse will thinks fit to consider so; he falls into a hopeless wail over the universal misery of man, who has a weary campaign of life appointed him ; then, rising up in the strength of his conscience, he upbraids the Almighty with His mis use of His power and His indiscriminate tyranny, righteous and innocent He destroys alike and challenges Him to lay aside His majesty and meet His creature as a man, and then he would not fear Him. Even in the second series Job can hardly bring himself to face the personal issue raised by the friends. His relations to God absorb him almost wholly, his pitiable isolation, the indignities showered on his once honoured head, the loathsome spectacle of. his body ; and, abandoned by all, he turns for pity from God to men and from men to God. Only in the third series of debates does he put out his hand and grasp firmly the theory of his friends, and their " defences of mud " fall to dust in his hands. Instead of that roseate moral order which they are never weary insisting upon, he finds only disorder and moral confusion. When lie thinks of it, trembling takes hold of him. It is not the righteous but the wicked that live, grow old, yea wax mighty in strength, that send forth their children like a flock and" establish them in their sight. Before the logic of facts the theory of the friends goes down ; and with this negative result, which the author skilfully reaches through the debate, has to be combined his own positive doctrine of the uses of adversity advanced in the prologue. To a reader of the poem now it appears strange that both parties were so entangled in the meshes of their preconceptions regarding God as to be unable to break through to broader views. The friends, while maintaining their position that injustice on the part of God is inconceivable, might have given its due weight to the per sistent testimony of Job s conscience as that behind which it is impossible to go, and found refuge in the reflexion that there might be something inexplicable in the. ways of God, and that affliction might have some other meaning than to punish the sinner or even to wean him from his sin. And Job, while maintaining his inno cence from overt sins, might have bowed beneath the rod of God and confessed that there was such sinfulness in every human life as to account for the severest chastisement from heaven, or at least have stopped short of charging God foolishly. Such a position would certainly be taken up by an afllicted saint now, and such an explanation of his sufferings would suggest itself to the sufferer, even though it might be in truth a false explanation. Perhaps here, where an artistic fault might seem to be committed, the art of the writer, or what is the same thing his truth to nature, and the extraordinary freedom with which he moves among his materials, as well as the power and individuality of his dramatic creations, are most remarkable. It was the role which the author reserved for himself to teach the truth on the question in dispute, and he accom plishes this by allowing his performers to push their false principles to their proper extreme. There is nothing about which men are usually so sure as about God. They are ever ready to take Him in their own hand, to interpret His providence in their own sense, to say what things are consistent or not with His character and word, and beat down the opposing consciences of other men, by His so-called authority, which is nothing but their own. The friends of Job were religious Orientals, men to whom God was a Being in im mediate contact with the world and life, effecting all things with no intervention of second causes, men to whom the idea of second causes was unknown, on whom science had not yet begun to dawn, nor the conception of a divine scheme pursuing a distant end by com plicated means, in which the individual s interest may suffer for the larger good. The broal sympathies of the author and his sense of the truth lying in the theory of the friends are seen in the scope which he allows them, in the richness of the thought and the s.plendid luxuriance of the imagery drawn from revelation, the immemorial moral consent of mankind, the testimony of the living conscience, and the observation of life with which he makes them clothe their views. He felt it needful to make a departure from a position too narrow to confine the providence of God within, but he remembered the elements of truth in the theory which he was departing from, that it was a national heritage, which he himself perhaps had been constrained not without a struggle to abandon ; and, while showing its insufficiency, he sets it forth in its most brilliant form.