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YALE UNIVERSITY
LIBRARY

THE LIBRARY OF THE
DIVINITY SCHOOL

THE SHORT COURSE SERIES

THE DIVINE DRAMA OF JOB

GENERAL PREFACE

The title of the present series is a sufficient
indication of its purpose. Few preachers,
or congregations, will face the long courses
of expository lectures which characterised
the preaching of the past, but there is a
growing conviction on the part of some
that an occasional short course, of six or
eight connected studies on one definite
theme, is a necessity of their mental and
ministerial life. It is at this point the pro
jected series would strike in. It would
suggest to those who are mapping out a
scheme of work for the future a variety of
subjects which might possibly be utilised in
this way.
The appeal, however, will not be restricted
to ministers or preachers. The various
volumes will meet the needs of laymen and

n

General Preface
Sabbath-school teachers who are interested
in a scholarly but also practical exposition
of Bible history and doctrine. In the hands
of office-bearers and mission-workers the
" Short Course Series " may easily become
one of the most convenient and valuable
of Bible helps.
It need scarcely be added that while an
effort has been made to secure, as far as
possible, a general uniformity in the scope
and character of the series, the final re
sponsibility for the special interpretations
and opinions introduced into the separate
volumes, rests entirely with the individual
contributors. A detailed list of the authors and their
subjects will be found at the close of each
volume.

111

XLbc Sbort Ccmrge Series
EDITED BY
Rev. JOHN ADAMS, B.D.

THE DIVINE DRAMA
OF JOB

CHARLES F. AKED, D.D.
( i '
AUTHOR OF
'the lord's prayer" "old EVENTS AND MODERN meanings"
"the courage of the coward" etc.

Edinburgh : T. & T. CLARK, 38 George Street
1913

Printed by
Morrison & Gibb Limited
FOR
T. & T. CLARK, EDINBURGH
London: simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, kent, and co. limited
new york : charles scribner's sons

CONTENTS

PAGE
I. The Insurrection of Doubt . . i
II. The Restoration of Faith . -19
III. Satan in Literature and in Life . 33
IV. Eliphaz the Seer . . . -49
V. Bildad the Sage . . . -65
VI. Zophar the Ordinary Soul . . 79
VII. The Intervention of Elihu . . 99
VIII. The Speeches of Jehovah . . 117
Appendix ..... 137
Index . . . . . -143

vn

' ' I loathe my life ; I would not live alway :
Let me alone ; for my days are vanity." Job vii. 16.
" Must it not be a deep spiritual instinct that drives
trouble into solitude? . . . Away- from the herd flies
the wounded deer ; away from the flock staggers the
sickly sheep — to the solitary covert to die. The man too
thinks it is to die ; but it is in truth so to return to life.
' Leave me to my misery,' cries the man, and lo, his
misery is the wind of the waving garments of him that
walks in the garden in the cool of the day ! AH misery
is God unknown."
Geo. Macdonald.

THE INSURRECTION OF DOUBT

THE INSURRECTION OF DOUBT
" Towering up alone, far away above all the
poetry of the world " — so runs the famous
criticism of the Book of Job pronounced
by one of the most noted men of letters
of the nineteenth century.1 Did Carlyle
influence Froude in this opinion as in
some others ? At least Froude may have
been driven to study Job afresh when
Carlyle's Heroes fell into his hands, some
thirteen years before he wrote his luminous
exposition. Carlyle would have it that Job,
" apart from all theories about it," is " one
of the grandest things ever written with
pen." "A noble book," he insists; "all
men's book . . . grand in its sincerity, in
1 James Anthony Froude, Short Studies on Great
Subjects, vol. i. 3

The Divine Drama of Job
its simplicity, in its epic melody, and repose
of reconcilement." And he multiplies words
of admiration, indeed, of awe : " Sublime
sorrow, sublime reconciliation ; oldest choral
melody as of the heart of mankind ; — so
soft and great ; as the summer midnight,
as the world with its seas and stars. There
is nothing written, I think, in the Bible or
out of it, of equal literary merit." 1
i. The Plot.
Job is a man, in the far-ofF patriarchal
days, rich in herds and flocks ; rich, too, in
sons and daughters ; rich in the esteem of
all his world, honoured, powerful, and great.
After calamity falls upon him he looks back
with blended pride and sadness to the time
of his prosperity :
" When I went forth to the gate unto the city,
When I prepared my seat in the street,
The young men saw me and hid themselves,
And the aged rose up and stood :
1 Carlyle, On Heroes : Lecture 2, " The Hero as
Prophet." 4

The Insurrection of Doubt
The princes refrained from talking,
And laid their hand on their mouth ;
The voice of the nobles was hushed,
And their tongue cleaved to the roof of their mouth.
For when the ear heard me, then it blessed me ;
And when the eye saw me, it gave witness unto me :
Because I. delivered the poor that cried,
The fatherless also, that had none to help him.
The blessing of him that was ready to perish came
upon me ;
And I caused the widow's heart to sing for joy." x
Unmerciful disaster brings him very low.
A robber band sweeps down upon his oxen
and his asses and carries them away, and
his men-servants they put to the sword.
Other bandits carry off his camels and kill
the young men in charge of them. A fire
destroys his sheep. And then a "great
wind from the wilderness smote the four
corners of the house " in which his children
held high festival, so that seven tall sons
and three fair daughters die together. Job
is attacked by a loathsome disease. Bereaved,
afflicted, lonely, " steeped in poverty to the
very lips," like many of the distressed
1 Job xxix. 7-13.
5

The Divine Drama of Job
amongst the children of men before his day
and since, he "wished that he had never
been born."
Friends come to condole with him. They
are three in number, Eliphaz, Bildad, and
Zophar, men of strangely diverse tempera
ment and habit of mind. They come to
him in entire friendliness. They approach
him with respect, even with reverence, for
they have not to be told that sorrow like
this sorrow is a sacred thing. Seven days
and seven nights they sit upon the ground
near to him, their garments rent, with ashes
on their heads. And "none spake a word
unto him ; for they saw that his grief was
very great." When, however, Job begins
to give sorrow words, his friends are shocked,
and, very mildly at first, with consideration
and deference and tenderness, they venture
to remonstrate with him and entreat him to
restrain the utterances of grief which seem
to them profane. And when Job, unrelieved
by their sympathy and unconsoled by their
preaching, persists in his outcry against the
evil fate which has overwhelmed him, they
6

The Insurrection of Doubt
lose patience and roundly reproach him.
They do more. They tell him, in effect,
that in some way he has brought these
misfortunes on himself. Though they
cannot lay their hands upon the secret sin
which has called down upon him the judg
ment of an offended God, yet they are very
sure that such secret sin there is. His pro
testations of innocence are in their eyes
added proof of guilt. God has ordained
that light shall shine upon the ways of the
righteous man while the lamp of the sinner
shall be put out. Had not Job so deeply
sinned he would not now so deeply suffer.
And since his sufferings are visible unto all
men it cannot but be that heaven has visited
upon him the recompense of his guilt. His
denials add hypocrisy to iniquity and crown
disobedience with insolent defiance of the
Most High !
These charges, false and foolish as they
are, and false as Job knows them to be,
increase his misery. To the gloom in which
he sits they add the horror of a great dark
ness which can be felt. And still the accusa-
7

The Divine Drama of Job
tions are piled up against him. They grow
more pointed, more definite, as the con
troversy proceeds. They deepen in intensity.
They increase in violence. And Job writhes
beneath them. They are false, and though
every living human being pronounce them
true he knows them false. Though earth
go reeling back to chaos he will yet deny
and denounce and damn the slanders which
affront his soul.
Before the end Jehovah intervenes. Al
though Job did not know it, Jehovah, in the
days of the great man's prosperity, had affirmed
the righteousness of His servant's life. He
had said that there was none like him on
the earth. He had described Job as an
upright and a perfect man, one who feared
God and turned from evil. Now He sternly
rebukes the friends who so misrepresent
Him to the suffering man. His wrath is
kindled against them because they have not
spoken of Him " the thing that is right."
And Jehovah " turned the captivity of Job "
and gave him twice as much as he had before.
Oxen and sheep and camels were multiplied

The Insurrection of Doubt
to him ; sons and daughters were born to
him : in the land were found no women so
fair as the daughters of Job : and his days
were long in the land.
2. Author and Origin.
Is this story fact or fiction, history or
parable ? Did such a man as Job ever live,
and did he experience these vicissitudes of
fortune ? Did his entire family of ten
children die in one day, and then was that
exact number of children born to him again
in after years ? Were seven thousand sheep
destroyed and fourteen thousand restored to
him ? Three thousand camels destroyed and
six thousand restored ? And so with the
asses and the oxen : did it really happen
that precisely double the number lost were
given to him again ? And did Jehovah
really deliver those long speeches, and if
so, how did He deliver them ? And who
reported them ? And how ?
These questions answer themselves, and
they go far to indicate the nature of the
Book of Job. We are not here concerned
9

The Divine Drama of Job
with fact, not even with fact decked out in
oriental hyperbole. Job is a work of imagi
nation, a poem, a dramatic poem ; and it is
not any more fact than Taradise Lost, Mac
beth, or Faust. It is poetry ; it is philo
sophy ; most of all, it is religion.
We need not inquire too particularly
concerning the location of the land of Uz.
It is a land of spirit. Neither do we need
to establish the lineage of Job himself.
Some suffering servant of Jehovah in some
unknown age may have suggested to the
unknown author the "plot" of his sublime
drama, and some unwisely learned, affec
tionately cruel friends of the sufferer may
have served the poet as models for his
artistic creations, Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zo-
phar. In this sense Job may be said to be
" founded on fact." But such speculations
are not free from a taint of pedantry, and in
any case they do not carry us far. This is in
truth " all men's book," and there is always
in the land of Uz a man whose name is Job.
It is very wonderful to think that this
book is anonymous. We, with our passion
10

The Insurrection of Doubt
for publicity, and with our rigid views of the
sacred rights of property in the children of
our brain, can with difficulty think ourselves
back to the mind of a day when a man of
genius, one of the first-born of the sons of
God, could give to the world a work greater
than Hamlet, greater than the Inferno, greater
than the Critias, and " scorn to blot it with
a name." And our wonder deepens as we
perceive that all the scholarship of all the
world has failed to find one shred of internal
evidence which goes to establish the place of
its origin or the century of its birth. From
the time of Moses to the period of the Exile
every century has been named by tradition
or by criticism as the date of Job. A critic
of international reputation * does indeed
declare that " beneath the patriarchal dis
guise " may be discerned " the features of
the author's own time," and that a late
period in the history of Israel ; that he
" betrays familiarity with the law " ; that he
1 A. B. Davidson, Job in the " Cambridge Bible for
Schools " ; and article " Job " in the Encyclopedia Britan-
nica, eleventh edition. II

The Divine Drama of Job
is " a true Israelite " and " betrays himself
to be so at every turn." The ordinary
reader of Job is a little chagrined by the
reflection that he cannot discover for himself
the ground of such dogmatic assurance.
And he takes comfort from the mild protest
of another scholar, held in equal honour by
two continents,1 "that other critics would
demur to such decided phraseology," and
that " it is certain that the book has to be
searched very carefully before any traces of
the law can be found in it, and these are not
of a very pronounced kind." On the other
hand, the references to life outside Israel,
the amazing information which the writer
possessed about the wonder-worlds in the
lands beyond, and about their traditions,
their myths, their cosmogony, startle and
bewilder the reader at every turn and upset
every theory as soon as it is advanced.
" The life, the manners, the customs are of
all varieties and places — Egypt, with its
river and its pyramids, is there ; the descrip-
1 W. T. Davison, article "Job " in Hastings' Dictionary
of the Bible. 12

The Insurrection of Doubt
tion 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. . . . 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 war of the giants, the imprisoned
Orion, the wounded dragon, the sweet in
fluences of the seven stars, and the glittering
fragments of the sea-snake Rahab trailing
across the northern sky."1 And it is not
strange that in the presence of these pheno
mena the reader exclaims that the "scenes,
the names, and the incidents, are all contrived
1 Froude, Short Studies.
13

The Divine Drama of Job
as if to baffle curiosity." The author of Job
remains the Great Unknown of literature.
3. The Great Polemic.
The theme of the Book of Job is the
world-old problem of pain and mystery of
evil, against which the thinkers of the race
have beaten their brains for twice two
thousand years. One after another, Bible
writers have looked the difficulty boldly in
the face — and passed on ! The author
of the thirty-seventh Psalm — some sweet-
natured, kind old man — concluded that it
was best not to fret over such perplexing
things, for worry tends only to wickedness.1
He was satisfied that the wicked might grow
to great power and spread himself like a
green tree in his native soil, but that soon
one would look for him in vain. While as
to the righteous, he declared — ¦
" I have been young, and now am old,
Yet have I not seen the righteous forsaken,
Nor his seed begging bread."
1 Psalm xxxvii. 1-8.
14

The Insurrection of Doubt
But the author of Job could have told him
that if he had not seen the righteous forsaken
others had, and had likewise seen the seed of
the righteous begging bread ! The writer of
the seventy-third Psalm, one of the most
characteristic and significant in the whole
Psalter, frankly confessed that the matter
was to him unthinkable,1 until he, too,
found refuge from the burden of it in the
forced belief which orthodoxy prescribed
that the end of the sinner would be violence
and death.
Upon such elementary " solutions " of his
problem the author of Job flings scorn.
There is one answer to them, and only one ;
but that is final and irrefutable ; they are not
true ! They are not true to the facts of life.
And men would not go on saying these
things if others had not said them before.
They are taught to say them. And genera
tion by generation the tongues of men repeat
them, though their minds, if they would but
use their minds, yield no consent to them.
These " solutions " are cheap and easy.
1 Psalm lxxiii. 16.
15

The Divine Drama of Job
They have become recognised formulas, and
men have " swallowed formulas." The word
was not then known, but the spirit of it
breathes in Job's passionate speeches ; these
sayings are mere " cant " — cant, be it
understood, properly defined as " unrealised
phraseology," words which are supposed to
cover a situation though their precise import
has not once been seriously considered by
the persons who repeat them so glibly. It
is simply not true that virtue will find its
sure reward in a life exempt from sickness,
pain, and sorrow. It is not true that a
violation of the laws of right will be fol-
' lowed by immediate, overwhelming calamity.
Habits which constitute "righteousness" do
on the whole and in the long run make for
prosperity, while unrighteousness blinds and
paralyses and destroys so that on the whole
and in the long run the wages of sin is death.
But in Job the accumulated miseries which
befall the hero are not the consequence of
his transgression. And on any broad view
of the many-coloured life of man upon this
earth some other explanation of the presence
16

The Insurrection of Doubt
and pressure of sorrow must be found. On
this tremendous subject the author of Job
sets himself to broaden the thought of the
world. Then what is his " solution ? " What
explanation does he offer ? None, absolutely
none. In the wonderful Book of Job this
is perhaps the most wonderful thing. The
opening chapter supplies a prologue to the
drama. There we are introduced into the
Court of Heaven. We see that the Satan is
given permission by Jehovah to afflict Job
in order to demonstrate to the unseen
powers the faith of the man. But this must
not for a moment be supposed to convey any
suggestion as to the real meaning of pain. So
to read it is to misconceive the object of
the prologue, and to set one's feet from the
beginning on a path which is bound to
lead to misunderstanding of Job. Davidson's
language is unfortunate : " Does then the
author offer no solution ? He does not,
and no solution is offered to us, unless
the prologue supplies it. This passage,
however, when naturally read, teaches that
b 17

The Divine Drama of Job
Job's sufferings were the trial of his
righteousness." The prologue was not
intended to teach this or anything else.
This is only the machinery of the drama, the
author's way of getting his characters upon
the stage and into action. The meaning of
suffering and its place in the providence of
God are yet to seek. The methods of our
author are those of the much decried
" negative criticism " ; but, for once at least
in the history of "rationalism," his conclu
sions are wholly spiritual, and the total net
result is not the destruction but the restora
tion of faith.

II
THE RESTORATION OF FAITH

19

II
THE RESTORATION OF FAITH
The author permits us to see the restoration
of faith in a fourfold vision.
i. God in the Soul of Man.
In Job we have a picture, without question
the noblest in literature, of a tried and
suffering man who, in defiance of poverty,
torture, and death, in defiance of all the
thought and all the belief of all his world,
and in defiance of Almighty God, will hold
on to the integrity of his soul.
In defiance of God Himself I — that is the
point. The martyrology of every nation is
crowded with stories of men and women
who have laughed to scorn the throned
tyrannies of the world. It is crowded with
the records of men and women who have
opposed their death-defying "Credo" to
21

The Divine Drama of Job
the orthodoxies of the ages, backed by
thumbscrew, rack, and gallows, by the legions
and the gods and all the powers of hell.
But these heroic souls had God on their side
— and they knew it ! Though for His
purposes He suffered the forces of darkness
for a time to wreak their will on the bodies
of men and women who believed in His
name, their souls were at peace with Him ;
and age by age they suffered the last pang of
physical pain intensified to agony, and went to
their God with a sigh of relief which was a
prayer of faith, " Father ? into Thy hand I
commend my spirit." x Job has his martyrdom
to endure unconsoled by any such faith. He
opposes himself to the thought of his world
as the martyrs of the Christian Church have
done. He opposes himself to the leaders of the
Church of his day as the martyrs have done.
But, as they have not done, he nerves his
soul to be true to the truth he knows is true,
in defiance of what he yet believes is God !
1 For instances of martyrs and famous leaders of the
Church dying with these words on their lips, see Prothero,
The Psalms in Human Life. 22

The Restoration of Faith
The key-note of this heroic mood is found
in one of the most famous passages in Job, one
of the most famous in any literature and in any
language of the world. " Though He slay me,
yet will I trust Him," the passage used to ¦
read, falsifying the thought of Job and obscur
ing the greatest utterance of the poet. When
the Revised Version gave a better translation
devout persons read it with a sense of loss.
" Foolish men, and slow of heart " — the new
reading lights up the whole story of Job :
" Behold, He will slay me ; I have no hope :
Nevertheless will I maintain my ways before Him."
He may slay me : God Himself may make
war upon me. But this one thing God
cannot do, He cannot make right wrong nor
with the universe to back Him coerce me
into a confession of a guilt I do not feel !
Seneca puts upon the lips of a pilot a
sentiment only less noble : " O Neptune,
you may save me if you will ; you may
sink me if you choose ; but whatever
happens I shall hold my rudder true."
Remember that this pilot believed in
23

The Divine Drama of Job
Neptune and in his power to sink or save ;
that he felt himself to be at that moment
and throughout his life at Neptune's mercy ;
then seek to measure the immeasurable
daring of this high resolve.
There is one spirit in these two brave
sentences. It is the assertion of a reality
more important and more lasting than what
men call life, greater and more commanding
than what men call God. In the Pilot it is
proud loyalty to duty ; in Job proud loyalty
to truth. In both it is the assurance of a some
what beyond all known and knowable things,
something which is spirit and which is life.
Tennyson, in one of his shorter pieces,
tells the story of a man who had lost faith
in religion. His disordered mind had fed
upon the crudest presentations of Calvinism
and the cheapest utterances of Atheism until
he had come to hate the very thought of
God. With his wife he seeks to drown
himself. She is lost, he is rescued ; and he
wails out his anguish in blasphemies too
sincere and despairing to be blasphemous.
And even then he conceives of the possi-
24

The Restoration of Faith
bility of God, the true God, the God whom
Jesus called Father, the God of Love in
whom we live and move and have our being.
"What! I should call on that Infinite Love that has
served us so well ?
Infinite cruelty rather that made everlasting hell,
Made us, foreknew us, foredoom'd us, and does what
He will with His own ;
Better our dead brute mother who never has heard
us groan !
Hell ? if the souls of men were immortal, as men
have been told,
The lecher would cleave to his lusts, and the miser
would yearn for his gold,
And so there were hell for ever ! but were there a
God as you say,
His love would have power over hell till it utterly
vanish'd away.
And yet — I have had some glimmer at times, in my
gloomiest woe,
Of a God behind all — after all — the great God for
aught that I know ;
But the God of Love and of hell together — they
cannot be thought,
If there be such a God, may the Great God curse
him and bring him to nought ! " x
1 Tennyson, Despair.
25

The Divine Drama of Job
When Tennyson wrote this he had
eighteen centuries of Christian thinking in
his blood, and for eighteen centuries the
Spirit of Christ had been modifying the air
he breathed. The author of Job conceived of
this God, behind all, after all, the great God
whom he did not know, long ages before
the only begotten Son who was in the bosom
of the Father declared Him. Flesh and
blood did not reveal this unto him. But
the Spirit of the living God gave him
understanding. And he appealed away
from the God of all the orthodoxies upon
earth to the God enthroned within his
soul.
2. The God Above All.
Job's appeal is not in vain. It is to carry
him far. It is to bring him within sight of
the reality to which he cries, and here, as
everywhere, wisdom is justified of her chil
dren. " I will not believe," says Sir Oliver
Lodge, " that it is given to man to think out
a clear and consistent system higher and
nobler than the real truth. Our highest
26

feel that

this

is God,

the

will do

him

The Restoration of Faith
thoughts are likely to be nearest to reality."
The man of science in the twentieth century
re-phrases the conviction which our old-
world poet voices in undying tones. The
modern thinker shapes and formulates the
instinctive reaching out of the spirit of
this prophetic man. The author of Job
first conceives of the possibility that such
a God might be, and on this God he
calls. Then he comes to
possible, conceivable God
true God, and that God
right. More than once Job utters this personal,
deathless faith in a personal, changeless God.
Twice he pours out the passion of his soul
in matchless words which the world will
never let die. From the abysses of despair,
when it seems to himself that he has been
" broken in pieces," he rises upon the wings
of hope to heights of unsurpassable assur
ance which are to this day the crown
and climax of believing prayer, and which
must remain the joy of faithful hearts for
ever. 27

The Divine Drama of Job
/" But as for me I know that my Vindicator liveth,
And at last He will stand up upon the earth :
And after my skin, even this body, is destroyed,
Then without my flesh shall I see God ;
Whom I, even I, shall see on my side." 1
If he cannot abide permanently on these
heights, if the impious piety of his friends
drags him down "from them, his dauntless
spirit seeks them again, and again ascends
them. He cannot see God, but he longs
for Him, and he is sure of Him.
" Oh that I knew where I might find Him !
That I might come even to His seat!
I would set my cause in order before Him,
And fill my mouth with arguments.
I would know the words which He would answer
me,
And understand what He would say unto me.
Would He contend with me in the greatness of His
power ?
Nay ; but He would give heed unto me.
There the upright might reason with Him ;
So should I be delivered for ever from my judge.
1 Job xix. 25-27. "Redeemer" in the text, "Vin
dicator " in the margin.
28

The Restoration of Faith
Behold, I go forward, but He is not there ;
And backward, but I cannot perceive Him ;
On the left hand, when He doth work, but I can
not behold Him ;
He hideth Himself on the right hand, that I can
not see Him.
But He knoweth the way that I take ;
When He hath tried me, I shall come forth as gold." 1
3. The Real Rewards of
Righteousness.
One great truth slowly emerges as the
drama of Job unfolds. The rewards of
righteousness are not to be found in material
things, not in flocks of sheep and herds of
cattle, and droves of camels, not in stocks
and bonds and bank balances, and they must
not be sought there. From this point of
view the epilogue adds nothing to the
grandeur of the poem, and it represents only
a lower conception of dramatic completeness.
The rewards of righteousness are in these
convictions which" we have been discussing,
the integrity of the soul, the conscious appeal
from earth to heaven, and the realised
1 Job xxiii. 3-10.
29

The Divine Drama of Job
presence of God our Saviour. You shall
not translate " Good " as " Goods " ; you
shall not measure by the stature of material
things nor by the standard of the market,
for this is a standard which God has rejected.1
But the sense of work well done, and a heart
at rest with itself, and the answer of a quiet
conscience, and the love of men and women
you have served and saved, and the smiles
of little children, and joy and peace in the
Holy Spirit, these are the rewards of right
eousness, and these cannot be taken from
you by any force or fraud, by fire or calamity
or death. And this is why Luther's words,
done by Carlyle into English as mighty as
Luther's German, are true and righteous
altogether —
"And though they take our life,
Goods, honour, children, wife ;
Yet is their profit small,
These things shall perish all ;
The city of God remaineth."
1 i Samuel xvi. 7.
30

The Restoration of Faith
4. Ultima Veritas
But the last of these great truths which
are interwoven with the very fabric of the
Book of Job remains to be stated. And
how simple it is, how elementary — yet how
profound, overwhelming, eternal ! When
we cannot know, it is enough to trust, and
when we cannot understand we shall be
saved from darkness and despair if we can
only love. We must all be agnostics some
where, if only we will put our agnosticism
in the right place. A little insight into the
character of God may be infinitely more
helpful to us than much foresight of His
purposes. In the hour when terrors threaten
we have but to stand still and see the glory
of the Lord. And when the clouds are so
thick that no glory can break through the
gloom, all the wisdom of all the ages is in
the counsel to trust in the Lord and wait
patiently for Him. What availed the
speculations, protestations, and fulminations
of Job in the end ? They had but darkened
counsel by words without knowledge. Job
3i

The Divine Drama of Job
had heard of Jehovah by the hearing of the
ear. But when his heart saw the living God
he was content. This is the truth of truths,
the first truth and the last, that
" Somewhere beyond the stars
Is a Love that is better than fate:
When the night unlocks her bars
I shall see Him, and I will wait." x
1 Washington Gladden, Ultima Veritas.

32

Ill
SATAN IN LITERATURE AND IN LIFE

33

Ill

SATAN IN LITERATURE AND IN
LIFE
An exposition of the " Satan " of the Book
of Job can never be entirely satisfactory, and
for these reasons :
First, the author assumes as matters of
common knowledge things about which we
have little or no information.
Second, we are not sufficiently certain of
the date of Job to find the needed informa
tion in contemporary literature and life, in
the theology, traditions, and folk-lore of the
time. Third, the pictoral representation of the
unseen powers of the universe, the personi
fications which our author employs, the
actions and motives which he ascribes to the
" spiritual hosts " alike of " wickedness " —
35

The Divine Drama of Job
if it be wickedness — and of holiness in " the
heavenly places," 1 are all so far removed
from our habits of thought that [we cannot
attach reality to them. Only very radical
treatment of the discussion can make possible
clear thinking and spiritual edification. Yet
we must be careful not to find in Job con
ceptions which may be entirely our own.
Satan in the Prologue.
Viewing the presentation of the Satan as
we find it in the first two chapters of the
Book of Job these things appear : —
i. Satan presents himself in the court of
Heaven along with the sons of God. There
is no definition of terms. We are not told
who the sons of God are. We are not told
how Satan comes to be numbered with them
yet to be different from them. His name
is best defined as "the adversary," though
of what or of whom he is the adversary, or
why as the adversary he should be present
in the court of Heaven, is not clearly stated.
2. There is no hostility between the
1 Ephesians vi. 12.
36

Satan in Literature and in Life
Satan and Jehovah. There is no rebellion,
no disobedience on the part of Satan, no
rebuke addressed by Jehovah to him. He
is received on equal terms with the sons of
God. He appears to be himself one of the
sons of God. They seem to have been
busy about Jehovah's business on earth, and
the Satan appears to occupy a favoured and
distinguished position amongst them. He
is a sort of superintendent or inspector or
overseer who, in the discharge of his duty
to Jehovah, has been "going to and fro in
the earth and walking up and down in it."
The sons of God, apparently, are reporting
upon their work, and Satan reports on his.
And he is interrogated by Jehovah concern
ing one great and notable personage on
earth, Job, " the greatest of all the children
of the east."
3. The Satan is authorised by Jehovah to
do a definite work ; he is instructed to apply
burning tests to the man of Uz.
4. And in this connection it appears that
he has power to inflict sufferings upon the
race of men, or upon individual men. As
37

The Divine Drama of Job
we know, robbers from the desert carry
away Job's possessions, his camels and his
oxen ; fire destroys his sheep ; a great
wind brings down the house in which
his sons and daughters are gathered, and
all ten perish in the ruins ; and Job is
brought near to death by a frightful disease.
These things, we gather, are caused by the
Satan. But all, it must be carefully noted,
are authorised by Jehovah. Satan does not
do these things out of a malevolent disposi
tion, warring against God. His authority
is a delegated authority. Jehovah has given
him leave to organise this succession of
calamities and sorrows.
5. Negatively, this also should be noted.
The Satan of Job does not tempt. The
tempting serpent of the Garden of Eden is
not here, nor the tempting Satan of New
Testament story. This Satan afflicts — by
Jehovah's express authority, as we have seen
— he does not assail the soul of man.
So far, the Satan acts only as an angel, i.e.
a " messenger," of God, not as a fallen
angel nor as an evil spirit. He is obedient
38

Satan in Literature and in Life
and faithful. And whether this is or is not
a credible representation of the unseen forces
which help to shape the lives of men, at
least it is not inconsistent or unintelligible.
But now the discussion is complicated
and the author's meaning is obscured by
the Satan's own words and by the spirit
which suggests them. He resorts to in
sinuations against the individual, and he is
guilty of blasphemy against the race.
Insinuations against Job.
" Doth Job fear God for nought ? " the
Satan demands ; and it is the mean, odious
suggestion which for long ages the world
has agreed to call satanic. " Hast not thou
made a hedge about him, and about his
house, and about all that he hath, on every
side ? Thou hast blessed the work of his
hands, and his substance is increased in the
land. But put forth thy hand now, and
touch all that he hath, and he will renounce
thee to thy face." 1 Whether we under
stand "Satan" or not, the man who speaks
1 Job i. 10, n.
39

The Divine Drama of Job
and thinks in this way has become satanic,
and the mood in which this view of men
and women, of their deeds and their motives,
arises spontaneously and habitually, is simply
" devilish." It is not the individual maligned
who suffers ; it is the one who can think
and say these things. When a man can
travel from Dan even to Beer-sheba in
human life and find all barren, find only
selfishness, meanness, intrigue, and cal
culating policy in the hearts of men and
women, it is not the men and women who
are wrong ; it is his own " satanised " soul.
Our world is full of human goodness and
kindness. The atmosphere we breathe is
charged with neighbourly helpfulness. It
is not possible to name one known form
of human weakness, sorrow, or distress
remediable or capable of alleviation which
men and women have not organised them
selves to combat. If to-day a new form of
suffering were discovered, conceivably re
movable by the effort of pity, love, and
generous help, to-morrow a " society " or
" committee " would be formed to fight the
40

Satan in Literature and in Life
cause and find the cure. In every town
and village in the world men and women
" serve God for nought " — save God alone !
Blasphemies against the Race.
" All that a man hath will he give for his
life " — God be praised, it is Satan's own
lie ! As these lines are being written there
comes a pathetic, inspiring refutation of it.
A friend of the writer, an English physician
resident in San Francisco, has been bitten
by a mad dog. Her Japanese "boy," a
servant in her home, has been bitten, too.
They are at this moment undergoing the
Pasteur treatment. And the doctors cannot
persuade the boy to take any food other
than bread and water, though they tell him
that he needs to " keep his strength up "
with good nourishing food. But the boy
says wearily — he has picked up the notion
somewhere, perhaps in his home in Japan —
that when one has been bitten by a rabid
animal, if he eats nothing but bread and
water, then, if he goes mad, "he will not
bite anybody." And this splendid, ignorant
4i

The Divine Drama of Job
boy, with the courage of a hero and the
devotion of a saint, is jeopardising the
success of the Pasteur treatment, running
the risk, that is to say, of a hideous death
from hydrophobia, so as not to risk the
remote possibility of inflicting injury upon
an unknown " somebody else." And the
records of the Christian martyrs reveal no
grander spirit. All that a man hath he will
give for his life ? This Japanese servant
will not give for his life the humanity which
God has planted in his soul.
What is the great, outstanding marvel
which stands revealed in every notable rail
way accident or wreck at sea or fire in a
building crowded with human beings ? Not
the readiness on the part of some hero to
throw his life away, in the attempt to save
a man or woman strange to him ; not the
absolute certainty that there is one hero
there ; but the fact that this hero is of the
same flesh and blood and human spirit as
everybody else ; that he has come out of
the crowd and will fall back into the crowd ;
and that never spark leaps from the stroke
42

Satan in Literature and in Life
of flint or steel more inevitably than sacrifice,
chivalry, and heroism leap from the contact
of this rugged soul with human need. The
simple fact is that we are brave all our life
without knowing it. It has become in
stinctive with us. There are thousands of
years of hereditary courage in our blood.
And of any blaspheming Satan of our day who
asks us to believe that all that a man hath he
will give for his life the words stand sure,'
" When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his
own ; for he is a liar, and the father thereof." 1
Satan in World-Literature.
The poets are the truest interpreters of
life. Three of the greatest of these children
of genius have stamped upon the thought
of the world their conception of the
adversary — the opposing, tempting principle
in the heart of man and in the universe.
Milton.
In Milton, Satan is one of the great angels
of God. He revolts, tries to establish an
1 John viii. 44.
43

The Divine Drama of Job
independent kingdom, is overcome by God
and flung into hell, with all his fellow-
traitors. In hell they set themselves to plan
and carry on rebellion. They hear of a new
world and of man, and they determine to
invade it, feeling that they can either
conquer it and live there instead of in hell,
or ravage and waste it and so do injury
to a province of their Almighty foe. Satan,
therefore, is sent to reconnoitre and report.
He finds out where earth is and goes ;
enters Eden, and hears the conversation
between Adam and Eve. He sits by the
side of the sleeping Eve, and in the shape
of a toad tries to hiss evil thoughts through
her ear into her mind. Ithuriel finds him
there and forces him away. He returns
in a mist, enters the serpent, accosts Eve
and persuades her to eat of the forbidden
fruit. Then Satan returns to hell, and there
he and his followers are changed into ser
pents ; trees spring up, laden with what seems
delicious fruit, which, when they eat, turns to
dust and ashes in their mouths. So has the
bruising of the serpent's head already begun.
44

Satan in Literature and in Life
The point of this is that Milton's Satan
becomes a Satan through baffled ambition
and hateful self-love. He will win ! He
must triumph ! He will gratify himself, his
hate, his revenge, his mortified longing for
self-glorification, utterly reckless of another's
loss or sorrow, utterly reckless of the loss
or sorrow of a world. It is the typical crime
of the universe. Byron.
In Byron, the devil finds Cain in an evil
mood, discontented with his lot, hating
work. He racks the mind of the man with
questions of life, death, good, evil, which
the man is incapable of answering, which,
indeed, he is incapable of understanding.
In his revolt against law and God his rage
is enflamed ; hate blazes up, and he becomes
a murderer. And again the lesson lies on the surface.
Whatever may be the pressure of pain or the
poignancy of thought rebellion will not help.
We shall not make the burden lighter by
raging against it. To a brave heart and a
45

The Divine Drama of Job
joyous faith the perplexities and troubles of
life one by one yield and bow — and if they
do not disappear from the life which now
we live, this same brave heart or joyous faith
is assured that they are " a light affliction,"
and " for the moment," which is " working
for us more and more exceedingly an eternal
weight of glory."1 And the warning of
Byron's Cain is in the words which God
Himself speaks to the first murderer while
yet there is for him time to be wise, " Why
art thou wroth, and why is thy countenance
fallen ? If thou doest well, shall it not be
lifted up ? But if thou doest not well,
behold sin croucheth 2 at the door ; and unto
thee is its desire — but thou shouldst rule over
it ! "
Goethe.
The difference between Milton's " Satan "
and Goethe's " Mephistopheles " is the differ
ence between the primitive conceptions of
1 2 Corinthians iv. 17.
2 Better than " coucheth " : sin is a wild beast,
crouching to make his spring. Genesis iv. 6, 7.
46

Satan in Literature and in Life
an ancient people and the aspirations and
yearnings of our complex civilisation.
Mephistopheles is a sneering devil. Though
a tempter, he tempts by scoffs. He finds
his victim baffled in the search for know
ledge, devitalised, and in that mood an easy
prey. It is when the higher faculties are wearied
and the higher emotions are exhausted that
we are ready to yield to the lower. The
sins of saints are often no more than the
actual devitalisation of the spiritual powers
through excitement and overstrain. After
spiritual triumph spiritual defeat is easy.
But a soul is "lost" only when the higher
is permanently subordinated to the lower.
This is the sin unto death.1 But it is not
so with Faust. For conscience is at work.
He is willing to risk his life to save his
victim. There is something which he, too,
will not " give for his life." And at last he
is victorious in the discovery that only in
working for the general good does man
attain unto life. 1 i John v. 1 6.
47

The Divine Drama of Job
To this conclusion come at last poetry,
philosophy, and revelation. The Son of
God is manifested to destroy the works of
the devil.1 And when Christ who is our life
is manifested — in our life — then shall we also
be manifested with Him in glory.2
1 i John iii. 8. 2 Colossians iii. 4.

48

IV
ELIPHAZ THE SEER

49

IV
ELIPHAZ THE SEER
The three friends who come to condole with
Job are named Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar.
The author means us to mark certain capital
distinctions which separate any one of them
from either of the other two. Subtleties of
characterisation are not to be looked for —
at least, by the ordinary student reading the
book in English. Broadly we may say that
Eliphaz is a man of the old, prophetic type,
if not quite great enough to be considered
a prophet. We will call him a seer. Bildad
is a man wise with the lore of his time and
of preceding generations. We will call him
a sage. Zophar is the average religious man
of his day, without distinguished intellectual
or spiritual culture. And, without prejudice,
he may be described as an ordinary soul.
5i

The Divine Drama of Job
The arrangement of the discussion is of
primitive simplicity. There are three cycles
of speeches. The friends speak in turn, and
Job replies to each before the other begins.
In the third cycle Zophar does not speak —
unless the disputed passage in chapter xxvii
is his final word. So there are three speeches
by Eliphaz with three replies by Job, three
speeches by Bildad with three replies, and
two speeches by Zophar with Job's replies.
Eliphaz, clearly the oldest man of the three,
the wisest, and the most important, is in all
the cycles the first speaker.
The First Speech of Eliphaz.
The opening words of Eliphaz breathe
genuine sympathy and -a spirit entirely noble.
He grieves with Job in his grief. He appeals
from Job in adversity to Job in prosperity,
and exhorts his friend to recall his own
teaching, and the faith which he had preached
to those in affliction. He plunges at once
into an assertion of the law of life, as he and
the other two understand it, and as he sup
poses Job understands it, the law of reward
52

Eliphaz the Seer
and retribution — an assertion which is to
cause Job greater mental and spiritual suffer
ing than the Satan has been able to inflict.
But there is no bitterness and no condemna
tion in the words of Eliphaz nor in his
thought. His meaning is, good must come
to the upright man, evil to the bad man :
you have been upright ; take courage, there
fore, and look for a good issue from all.
But the word " upright " as applied to
any human being, and every related and
similar word connoting righteousness, must
be regarded as subject to a thousand deduc
tions and qualifications. Eliphaz shrinks
from the implication of his own words.
And he proceeds to affirm the corruption of
our human nature in round set speech which
leaves no loophole for exception. In language,
the majesty of which has appealed to every
person of literary taste who has ever opened
the Book of Job, Eliphaz describes his vision
in the night :
" Fear came upon me, and trembling,
Which made all my bones to shake.
53

The Divine Drama of Job
Then a spirit passed before my face ;
The hair of my flesh stood up.
It stood still, but I could not discern the appearance
thereof;
A form was before mine eyes ;
There was silence, and I heard a voice, saying,
Shall mortal man be just before God ?
Shall a man be pure in the presence of his Maker ? " x
It is pathetic to reflect that the vision of
Eliphaz, so awe-inspiring in itself, and
described in language the most impressive
which has ever served to make an apparition
real, does but bring to him a supernatural
sanction of his disheartening dogma concern
ing the corruption of mankind !
But clearly it is not for Job to storm the
battlements of heaven with his audacities.
Man does but suffer the consequences of
this fraility of his blood. Virtue consists in
submission to the will of God. God is
righteous, and His beneficence is over all.
Were he, Eliphaz, in like manner afflicted
he would seek unto God, humbly, penitently,
dutifully ; he would praise Him for His
providence, His goodness, and His un-
1 Job iv. 14-17.
54

Eliphaz the Seer
ceasing care. Yea, he would go further ;
he would praise Him for His chastisements
— "happy is the man whom God correcteth "
— and to this submission he exhorts Job,
promising to him, in the name of his God,
deliverance from all his trouble, the restora
tion of his wealth, children and children's
children, a grand old age, a sweet and
peaceful death.
The Failure of the Speech.
The speech fails of its purpose. Exam
ining it carefully we see that it was bound
to fail.
The speech lacks the note of human
feeling. In the common phrase of our day,
there is no red blood in it. Lofty ? Yes.
Eloquent ? Without a doubt. And true
as the truth was then conceived. For us
the theology is bad theology and the
philosophy is unsound. And this, we know,
is the view of the author. He allows the
patriarch to put the friends to silence.
Jehovah rebukes them. These facts must
be borne in mind throughout the study of
55

The Divine Drama of Job
Job. It would be wearying to insist upon
them at each fresh stage of the debate. The
point, however, is not that the theology and
the philosophy are false and bad, but that
theology and philosophy, good or bad, are
wholly out of place. At such an hour it is
not loftiness of thought nor eloquence of
diction nor the most admired truths of
philosophy which the sufferer needs. He
wants the grip of a friend's hand, the light
that shines from a soul that knows through
eyes that see, and most of all, he wants to
feel that his friend feels as he does — resents
as a personal wrong the grief that has fallen
upon him, and is ready when occasion offers
to take up arms on his behalf against the
universe ! This may not. be sound theology
nor may it fit the mood of a great philo
sopher. But theology and philosophy are
precisely what the sufferer cannot away with.
He wants to feel the heart-beats of a brother
man. If the preacher is to bring to the sorrow
ing comfort and strength he must identify
himself with his suffering brother. The
56

Eliphaz the Seer

successful advocate in a court of justice
insists upon the " we " until one smiles at
the affectation. But there is no madness in
his method. " We " did this, he asserts,
" we " said that, and " we " are ready to
swear to something else. And the unsuc
cessful preacher says "you!" The differ
ence too often is not in word ; it is in the
essence and in substance. A preacher
cannot find for the word he speaks entrance
into another's heart until he has knocked at
the door of his own. He must bring to
() repentance the sinner in the pulpit before he
can convict of sin the sinner in the pew.
His deepest word must ever be, " Come
and let us return unto the Lord ! " " Let
us exalt His name together ! " And when
he kneels by the bed of pain or stands with
the bereaved by the open grave, he cannot
mediate to the stricken soul the consolation
of our God unless he first resents with a
personal resentment the stroke which has
fallen, and then along with the sufferer sub
mits himself to the will of God. " When
Jesus therefore saw her weeping, and the
57

The Divine Drama of Job
Jews also weeping who came with her, he
was moved with indignation in the spirit,
and was troubled." 1 We have not a high
priest that cannot be touched with the feel-
of our infirmities !
The Second Speech of Eliphaz.
The faults of the first speech are
accentuated in the second. And there is an
added element of bitterness. Eliphaz has
been deeply wounded by the contempt with
which Job has brushed aside his philosophis
ing and the preaching of his companions.
He has lost patience with Job, and he shows
it. He is shocked and horrified by the
daring irreverences of Job, the rebelliousness
of his complaints and the audacity of his
appeals to the Most High. And he is
persuaded that Job is a worse man than he
supposed. Sorrow and affliction are bring
ing the true man into view, Eliphaz thinks,
and the true Job he begins to see in a very
unfavourable light. Iniquity and craftiness,
he declares, shape the thoughts of Job ;
1 John xi. 33 (margin of Revised Version).
58

Eliphaz the Seer
and the words of his mouth condemn him.
He comes back to his degrading view of
human nature, once more affirming its innate
corruption, and in support of his view appeals
to the judgment of the pure races of man
kind in many ages.
But in one way the matter of his polemic
has been modified. He ceases to declare
that all is well with the righteous ; he con
tents himself with proclaiming the penal
consequences of wrong-doing. It is a
characteristic of the genius of our author
that he puts into the mouth of Eliphaz large
and striking truths concerning the fate of
the wicked. When he asserts a law, a law
which knows no exceptions and no delays,
he is in error as to the fact. When he
reverses the statement of the law, "The
wicked suffer," and makes it read, "Those
who suffer are wicked," he wrongs both man
and God. When he applies the inverted
rule to a particular instance, the case of Job,
and asserts Job's gross and palpable wicked
ness, he himself descends to gross and
palpable untruths. The things that he
59

The Divine Drama of Job
asserts concerning the retributive conse
quences of guilt are true, and we do well to
remember them : the sense of threatening
calamity induced by an accusing conscience,
and the disintegrating, destructive power of
sensual sin. It is the use he makes of these
truths which turns them into cruel falsities.
It is not enough to present the truth. The
truth must be presented truly. God,
Justice, and Eternal Judgment, Christ, the
Incarnation, and the Atonement, truths more
indestructible than the universe, may each
and every one of them be affirmed by the
preacher in such a way as to be false to the
mind or heart that needs them most. We
need to remember that every apologetic, like
every appeal, is relative — it is relative to the
individual to whom it is addressed, and
relative as well to his temperament, his
circumstances, and the mood in which it
finds him.
Eliphaz concludes without a word of
sympathy, without a breath of hope. And
such a conclusion condemns itself.

60

Eliphaz the Seer
The Third Speech of Eliphaz.
When next Eliphaz speaks it is clear that
his thoughts have gone from bad to worse.
The lesson of it has been admirably stated :
" In this last colloquy we are saddened by an
impressive illustration of the baneful effect of
mere controversy even on a mind of the
largest and most generous kind. Eliphaz,
the prophet, sinks well-nigh to the level of
Zophar, the bigot. . . . Stung by the
mortification of defeat, he breaks out into a
string of definite charges against Job, accusing
him of the most vulgar and brutal crimes for
which he could allege no shadow of proof." x
The language is not too strong. Eliphaz
is not satisfied with hints of secret wrong
doing. He is not content with the assertion
of his false and foolish syllogism : " The
wicked suffer ; you are suffering ; therefore
you are wicked." He comes down to par
ticulars, and lies — there is no other word for
it — for the honour of God, as many have
done since, but never without disaster.
1 Cox, Job, in loco.
61

The Divine Drama of Job
" For thou hast taken pledges of thy brother for
nought,
And stripped the naked of their clothing.
Thou hast not given water to the weary to drink,
And thou hast withholden bread from the hungry.
Thou hast sent widows away empty,
And the arms of the fatherless have been broken." 1
There can be no palliation of this. We
had better learn the lesson of it. That
lesson is " writ large " across the history of
councils, synods, assemblies for nearly
twenty centuries. From theological bitter
ness to false witness against one's neighbour,
how easy the descent ! But when an honest
difference of opinion about the meaning of a
Hebrew verb or Greek substantive becomes
an occasion of moral offence and a cause of
rancour, of envy, hatred, malice, and all un-
charitableness, the grounds of sanity have
been departed from not less surely than the
Christian spirit. Where there is no sense of
proportion there is no sanity. And if any
man have not the mind of Christ he is none
of His ! 1 Job xxii. 6, 7, 9.
62

Eliphaz the Seer

The Salvation of Eliphaz.
Most happily, in the case of Eliphaz, we
have not to leave it here. The great man in
him asserts itself above the cramping little
ness of his creed. The soul of the seer sees
and the heart of the prophet flames with
love and truth. His final words are words
of appeal, and the appeal is of all but match
less worth.
" Acquaint now thyself with him and be at peace " ;
he begins, and in words of strength and grace
and beauty he proceeds to tell the blessed
ness of the life which is lived in God. He
speaks of its joy :
" Thou shalt delight thyself in the Almighty " ;
of its assurance :
"Thou shalt lift up thy face unto God" ;
of communion :
" Thou shalt make thy prayer unto him, and he will
hear thee " ;
63

The Divine Drama of Job
of enduring influence :
" Thou shalt decree a thing and it shall be established
unto thee ;
And light shall shine upon thy ways " ;
and of the priesthood of believing souls :
" Even him that is not innocent thou shalt deliver ;
Yea, he shall be delivered through the cleanness of
thy hands."
Eliphaz has lost the debate, but he has
saved — himself !

64

v
BILDAD THE SAGE

65

V
BILDAD THE SAGE
The first speech of Bildad is given in the
eighth chapter of Job. It opens with a
rebuke of the sufferer's stormy words
(ver. 2), and proceeds at once to affirm the
rectitude of all God's judgments (ver. 3).
Bildad is harsh, cruelly harsh, from the
outset. He tells the bereaved father, in
round, set terms, that his dead children
deserved their fate (ver. 4) ; and after
such an opening it is in vain that he exhorts
Job to penitence and prayer (ver. 5). Yet
in the spirit of many an unconvincing, un-
persuasive preacher who thinks to scold a
congregation into well-doing, Bildad holds
his course. He claims the authority of the
ages for his view. These are early days
for an appeal to " the general consent of
67

The Divine Drama of Job
mankind," but we find it here, or at least,
to the general consent of the wise and the
learned of other generations. Verse 9 must
not be quoted as a description of the awful
brevity of our life upon the earth :
" For we are but of yesterday and know nothing,
And our days upon the earth are as a shadow."
Bildad means that it might be permissible for
Job to consider his wisdom and the wisdom
of the other two friends as of small account ;
that if it stood alone it would be of little worth,
for they are children of their day and hour,
living their little life and passing out of
the sun. But the word which they speak
is not theirs. It represents the garnered
wisdom of ages — and of ages again. It is
not the wisdom only of their fathers, but
of their fathers' fathers (ver. 8), and it
rests upon the experiences of uncounted
centuries.
Bildad's Second Speech.
Bildad's second speech (chapter xviii)
seems to possess no single redeeming quality.
68

Bildad the Sage
The first does make an attempt — a poor
attempt, but still an honest one — to strike
a note of hope :
" Behold, God will not cast away a perfect man,
Neither will He uphold the evil-doers.
He will yet fill thy mouth with laughter,
And thy lips with shouting "—
if, it is understood, thou dost turn to Him
and repent and acknowledge thy wickedness
before Him. But now Bildad is incapable
of even such poor preaching as this. With
him, as with Eliphaz, personal resentment
has bred bitterness of spirit, and Job's
theological transgressions have assumed the
dimensions of a huge moral wrong. Chapter
xviii is a masterpiece in its way, and it is
a pity that we are not free to admire its
literary art and power. We feel with Job
as well as for him, and like him we are
angry that Bildad should say such things
as these. But how well he says them !
How finely he demands whether the eternal
order shall be shaken to its depths to meet
Job's necessities :
69

The Divine Drama of Job
" Thou that tearest thyself in thine anger,
Shall the earth be forsaken for thee ?
Or the rock be removed out of its place ? "
And his picture of the unrighteous man
alone with his unrighteousness in the dark
ness of the night :
" Yea, the light of the wicked shall be put out,
And the spark of his fire shall not shine.
The light shall be dark in his tent,
And his lamp above him shall be put out."
With what art he accumulates synonyms
for " net " in the famous passage which
has driven one expositor to call this the
" Net " speech :
" For he is cast into a net by his own feet,
And he walketh upon the toils.
A gin shall take him by the heel,
And a snare shall lay hold on him.
A noose is hid for him in the ground,
And a trap for him in the way."
And the climax to which he mounts, the
underlining of his emphasis, so to speak :
" Surely such are the dwellings of the unrighteous,
And this is the place of him that knoweth not
God."
70

Bildad the Sage
He has cast very wide the net, the toils,
the gin, the snare, the noose, and the trap
of his rhetoric, and Job is finely caught
within it !
The Third Speech of Bildad.
There is nothing in Bildad's last word
(chapter xxv). He stands amazed at the
sight of Job's unsubduable irreverence. He
gasps out a repetition of the Eliphaz
contempt for human nature, protests that
in the presence of the Ineffable there is no
brightness in the moon and that the stars
forget their shining ; and so measuring the
immeasurable distances between the holiness
of God and the meanness of man " that
is a worm " (ver. 6), turns away in shocked
and stunned and solemn silence.
Defences of Clay.
So, then, Bildad, the sage, adds nothing
to the case presented by Eliphaz, the seer.
His argument is the same : God punishes
the wicked and rewards the righteous ; Job
is being punished for his wickedness ; and
7i

The Divine Drama of Job
it is impious to rebel against God. The
falsity of the statement about Job and the
fallacy of the argument are alike clear to
us. And it would be a weariness to the
flesh to analyse Bildad's speeches and point
out their failures of logic and of humanity.
When we seriously consider the paucity of
the argument, the monotonous iteration and
reiteration of the single, unsustained or
badly sustained thesis, we are driven to the
conclusion that so supreme an artist as the
author of Job meant us to become intolerant,
even a little disdainful, of their " memorable
sayings" which Job denounced as "proverbs
of ashes," and their dialectical defences which
he scorned as " defences of clay." x In the
case of Bildad, indeed, there is no claim to
originality. Eliphaz appeals to visions of
the night, Bildad only to the wisdom of
ages dead and gone* He is of the type of
the scribe with whom study of the New
Testament has made us familiar. His
strength is grounded in precedent, authority,
and antiquity. Men have always believed
1 Job xiii. 12.
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Bildad the Sage
that God's judgments are such as he, Bildad,
declares them to be ; and who is Job that
he should doubt it ?
The Appeal to Antiquity.
Herein this ancient document is painfully
modern. The mind that seeks strength
and wisdom in the past, that contemns the
present, and fears the future, is found in our
day as in every day of which the record
remains. " Conservative " and " Radical "
are not theological terms, or words borrowed
from party politics, nor even descriptions of
antagonistic temperaments. They are terms
of biology, and they go back to characteristics
which were functional in protoplasm ! The
deadly offence of Socrates is that he does not
" believe in the gods of the city," and that
he " introduces new divinities." Aristo
phanes hates with a perfect hatred the
" modernity " of the fifth century before
Christ. The Clouds is his protest against the
immorality of modern thought. His spirit
is stirred within him when he contrasts the
degeneracy of manners in his day with the
73

The Divine Drama of Job
simplicity and strength of life in the good old
times of the Persian wars ! The American
housewife who complains of her " hired girl,"
and the English-woman who laments the
eccentricities of her "maid," are not any
more modern than that unpleasant Old
Testament person who gave his opinion of
" servants nowadays." x When Gladstone
was a candidate for Newark — a young man
of twenty-three — he was asked to explain
what he meant by a sentence in his address
about a " return to sounder general prin
ciples," and he replied that he had in mind
" the manly and God-fearing principles of
two hundred years before." The definite-
ness of his reply was unfortunate, for a
mocking voice rang out, " when they burned
witches ! " Yet to minds so constituted as
those of Aristophanes, Nabal, and Gladstone
— and it would not be possible to name in
one breath three individuals more widely
separated by oceans of spiritual and tempera
mental differences — an appeal to the judgment
of past times will always seem right and wise.
1 i Samuel xxv. 10.
74

Bildad the Sage

Oliver Wendell Holmes, with malice
aforethought, puts the objection to this
appeal in its crudest form. When Calvin
and his associates made themselves a party
to the burning of Servetus, the " Professor "
declares that they were " in a state of re
ligious barbarism " ; and he goes on, " the
dogmas of such people about the Father of
mankind and His creatures are of no more
account in my opinion than those of a
council of Aztecs. If a man picks your
pocket, do you not consider him thereby
disqualified to pronounce any authoritative
opinion on matters of ethics ? If a man
hangs my ancient female relative for sorcery,
as they did in this neighbourhood a little
while ago, or burns my instructor for not
believing as he does, I care no more for his
religious edicts than I should for those of
any other barbarian." J
Between these two methods of regarding
life the student of the Book of Job will
hardly be called upon to choose. The choice
1 Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Professor at the Break
fast Table. 75

The Divine Drama of Job
has long ago been made, largely for him,
partly by him. He will esteem the appeal
to the past as of great or little worth accord
ing as his temperamental inclination is, to
quote Oliver Wendell Holmes again, "to
ward God in us or God in our masters."
But the age we live in, with its crying needs,
bids the preacher believe that God is not a
God of the dead but of the living, and
demands of him whether he has not received
the Holy Ghost since he believed. And
Dr. Faunce, in his noble Yale lectures of
1908, goes so far as to assert that the whole
discussion of the minister's mediating work
may be summed up by saying that " he is to
keep alive man's faith in an ever present
God." He quotes the title of a story by
Rudyard Kipling, The Man who was, and
he says, "there are sincerely devout men
who seem to believe in a God who was.
He was with Moses, they say, opening up
streams in the flinty rock ; but now men
must dig wells or build aqueducts if they
want water. He was with Israel, granting
the people bread from heaven ; but now if a
76

Bildad the Sage
man wants bread, let him work for it. He
was with David and anointed him to the
kingship ; but now he anoints nobody, and
those who want high office must secure the
votes. About the year ioo a.d. all inspira
tion ceased, and about 200 a.d. all miracles
ceased, and now in a world bereft of divine
voices we stumble and grope till the end.
O young prophets of the truth, such an idea
is the master falsehood of humanity ! It is
the one fundamental untruth which will put
unreality into every sermon and impiety into
every prayer. Our God was, and is, and is
to come." 1
1 William H. P. Faunce, The Educational Ideal in the
Ministry.

77

VI
ZOPHAR THE ORDINARY SOUL

79

VI
ZOPHAR THE ORDINARY SOUL
Zophar is the last speaker in each of the
first two cycles. In the third he does not
appear. It is reasonable to suppose that he
is the youngest of the three friends and the
least important. But it must be remembered
that all three are great men, representative of
what is wisest and best in the life of their
day and country. Job is a man " born out
of due season," a man in advance of his time,
a path-finder and a banner-bearer. In their
eyes he is worse than an innovator. He is
an iconoclast. He is irreverent, profane, a
blasphemer whose sufferings are the result of
sin and the cause of deeper sin. We know
that the friends are deeply in error. Jehovah
testifies that they have said of Him the things
which are not right. But they are wise with
f "81

The Divine Drama of Job
the wisdom of their time. And they thought
they did God service.
All this must be remembered as we come
to the study of Zophar. He is not a man
to be despised, however much we may, on
Job's behalf, resent the things he says. He
is not a seer like Eliphaz, nor a sage like
Bildad ; but the Church must have its
ordinary souls as well as its seers and sages,
its heroes and saints. If the things that he
says are not new, at least he says them
marvellously well, and some it would be
difficult even now for any of us to say better.
What can be finer than his outburst of
wonder and awe in the presence of the
divine omniscience ?
" Canst thou by searching find out God ?
Canst thou find out the Almighty unto perfection ?
It is high as heaven ; what canst thou do ?
Deeper than Sheol ; what canst thou know ? 1
The man through whose lips the author of
Job speaks these noble lines is not to be
dismissed as a contemptible person noticeable
1 Job xi. 7, 8.
82

Zophar the Ordinary Soul
only by reason of his odious vulgarity and
bigotry.1 Zophar's First Speech.
Zophar's opening words (chap. xi.
vers. 1-6) cannot be defended. He is
harsh from the very outset. He comes as a
friend : he speaks as a foe. Read even in
English his words have the effect of shots
from a quick-firing gun. Job is a " bab
bler," a man " full of talk," literally " a man
of lips " whose wild words come neither from
brain nor heart, a " boaster " and a " mocker."
Job has longed to hear God speak, but
Zophar is satisfied that if Job should find
himself cursed by the burden of a granted
prayer he would be exposed and abased.
There follows the glowing tribute to the
1 The reader who is interested may turn with profit to
Cox's vituperative characterisation of Zophar in his com
mentary on Job ; and then he should open Joseph Parker's
People's Bible, vol. 1 1, "Job," and note how Cox's denun
ciation of Zophar drove Parker into a eulogy of the
"fearlessly critical, deeply religious" Zophar more un
reasonable than Cox's bitterness. It is more than enter
taining. It is significant. To preachers it is a warning.
83

The Divine Drama of Job
unspeakable wisdom of God already quoted,
and then preaching which shows that this
average man of a forgotten day has learned
what we need always to remember that there
is no " evangel " except preaching with
promise. He exhorts Job (vers. 13, 14) to
" set the heart right " and " stretch out the
hands " to God. He bids him —
" If iniquity be in thy hand, put it far away,
And let not unrighteousness dwell in thy tents."
And if he will do this,
" Surely then shalt thou lift up thy face without
spot ;
Yea, thou shalt be steadfast, and shalt not fear :
For thou shalt forget thy misery ;
Thou shalt remember it as waters that are passed
away.
And thy life shall be clearer than the noonday ;
Though there be darkness, it shall be as the
morning.
And thou shalt be secure, because there is hope ;
Yea, thou shalt search about thee, and shalt take
thy rest in safety.
Also thou shalt lie down, and none shall make thee
afraid." J !Job xi. 15-19.
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Zophar the Ordinary Soul
He has spoken well, once the harshness of
his opening words has been laid aside. The
pity is that he should have prejudiced us
against his message by the bitterness of his
spirit. Herein is matter of grave concern.
The preacher who " nags " is not by any
means more admirable than the " nagging "
husband or the " nagging " wife. It is de
pressing to " worship " in an atmosphere of
fault-finding. It is intolerable to live in an
atmosphere of " snarl." We cannot denounce
people into goodness. We cannot coerce
them to Christ. There are times when the
world needs a son of thunder with his fiery
tongue and prophet's heart of flame. But
not all of us are called to an apostolate of
protest or ministry of rebuke. Not all of
us are fitted for it. The mighty hater may
be a servant of God — but only on condition
that he has first proved himself a heroic
lover. The ethics of denunciation must be
studied with greater care than we have yet
bestowed upon it. Hate is too precious a
thing to be wasted. It must be kept for
the supreme moment and the Christ-like
85

The Divine Drama of Job
mood.1 The Angel of the Church at Ephesus
is praised because he hates " the works of the
Nicolaitans, which I also hate." If we hate
nothing which we are satisfied the Risen
Christ does not hate we shall not go far
wrong. And even then our " hate " must
be so pure, so white-hot in its holiness, that
it can live side by side with a love like
His. 1 Frederick William Robertson relates a conversation
in which he took part. Someone maintained that "the
indignation expressed by Christ against hypocrisy was no
precedent for us, inasmuch as He spoke as a Divine
person." And Robertson goes on : "I contended that
it was human, and if a man did not feel something of the
same spirit under similar circumstances, if his blood could
not boil with indignation, nor the syllable of withering
justice rise to his lips, he could not even conceive His
spirit. Mr. E  agreed to this, to my surprise, and
told an anecdote. ' Could you not have felt indignation
for that, Robertson ? ' My blood was at the moment
running fire — not at his story, however ; and I remem
bered that I had once in my life stood before my fellow-
creature with words that scathed and blasted ; once in
my life I felt a terrible might ; I knew, and rejoiced to
know, that I was inflicting the sentence of a coward's and
a liar's hell." — Life and Letters of the Rev. W. Robertson,
p. 141.
86

Zophar the Ordinary Soul
Zophar's Second Speech
Zophar's second speech (chapter xx)
passes all bounds. It follows close upon
the marvellous appeal of Job from the in
justice of earth to the justice of heaven. It
is Zophar's coarse and cruel reply to Job's
passionate " I know that my Vindicator
liveth," and his assurance that his cause will
triumph after his death. Zophar bids him
believe (ver. 5) that "the triumph of the
wicked is short " and the "joy of the god
less for a moment." To us who know the
facts Zophar's description of Job as an epi
cure in sin is merely foolish. To Job him
self, sick in body and in mind and heart-sick,
too, bereaved, abandoned, such wild and
wicked charges are maddening. They lash
his spirit. Zophar rushes on (vers. 12, 13):
" Though wickedness be sweet in his mouth,
Though he hide it under his tongue,
Though he spare it, and will not let it go,
But keep it still within his mouth " —
rolls it under his tongue, that is to say, as a
sweet morsel, this sin in which he delights !
87

The Divine Drama of Job
No wonder Job refuses to recognise himself
in so monstrous a description. " Hast thou
considered my servant Job ? " — we have not
forgotten Jehovah's question, nor His account
of the man of Uz : " There is none like him
in the earth, a perfect and upright man, one
that feareth God, and turneth away from
evil " — not one that " sups full of horrors "
and of infamies until the surfeit of them
nauseates him (ver. 1 5) ! Has Job
challenged the verdict of heaven ? Heaven
and earth alike condemn him, Zophar says :
" The heavens shall reveal his iniquity,
And the earth shall rise up against him."
And once again, lest any should miss the
personal application of all this, the formula
is spoken :
" This is the portion of a wicked man from God,
And the heritage appointed unto him by God."
Gospel-hardened.
We know that Job's daring and glorious
appeal did not fail in heaven. It is painful
to observe how it failed on earth. Coarse-
88

Zophar the Ordinary Soul
ness and cruelty, we have seen, are Zophar's
answer to the " Vindicator " passage — and
not only to that immortal plaint but to a cry
as sad, as heavily charged with anquish, as
ever broke from a suffering heart :
" Have pity upon me, have pity upon me, O ye my
friends ?
For the hand of God hath touched me." x
How can this human nature of ours be so
w-human, so callous, so wolfish ? There is
no answer to such a question. It is the
tragedy of all redemptive work amongst
men. It is the tragedy of Redemption.
" What hast thou done ? " Pilate demanded
of the pale Prisoner at his judgment bar.
And the answer might have been : Deeds of
love and mercy without end ! He was Pity
incarnate, He was divine Compassion, He
was ineffable Goodness and Gentleness. But
priests conspired His death ; the crowd
clamoured for Barabbas ; the soldiers lashed
Him with whips, played a hideous game
with Him as they blindfolded Him and
1 Job xix. 21.
89

The Divine Drama of Job
demanded, "Prophesy who struck thee,"
pressed thorns upon His brow — and they
crucified Him ! Age by age the terribly sad
word of Isaiah, quoted by Jesus, quoted
again by Paul, has been fulfilled in the lives
of men and women.1 They have grown
harder and coarser, as the word of God has
been proclaimed to them. The heart has
become fat, and the ears heavy, and their eyes
have been closed. Browning attempts an
answer to Shakespeare's question :
" ' Is there a reason in nature for these hard hearts ! '
O Lear,
That a reason out of nature must turn them soft,
seems clear " ;
but the horror of great darkness falls upon
us when we discover that the "reason out
of nature " incarnate in the Son of God fails
at times to "turn them soft."
In a way there is a measure of sad comfort
for the preacher in a remembrance of these
1 Isaiah vi. 9, 10. See George Adam Smith's won
derful note on this passage and his striking quotation
from Mazzini.
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Zophar the Ordinary Soul
facts. We fail. Our preaching fails. Our
prayers fail. The man or woman we have
agonised for lives in sin and dies in sin.
And we reproach ourselves with the failure
and say that if we had lived nearer to God
and with an importunity of prayer that would
not be denied besought Him for this life,
the effectual fervent prayer would not have
returned unto us void. Yes, perhaps, in
some particular case. But Isaiah knew that
failure was sometimes inevitable, and Paul
knew it ; and our Lord affirmed that such
experiences partake of the nature of law.
These things are too high for us ; we turn
away from them with a heavy heart. But
the measure of self-blame is reduced, and
each of us is able to find relief in the
reflection, "I am glad to think
I am not bound to make the world go right ;
But only to discover and to do,
With cheerful heart, the work that God appoints.
I will trust in Him
That He can hold His own."1
1 Jean Ingelow.
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The Divine Drama of Job
The Triple Blunder.
Now that the speeches of Eliphaz, Bildad,
and Zophar are before us, it is easy to see
the rocks on which each went to grief. We
may speak of a " triple blunder " and be
twice right, for each one of the three is
guilty of the same three mistakes, any one
of which would have made shipwreck of
intentions as good as theirs.
i. Personal resentment warps their views.
It must ever be remembered that they come
to Job with honest hearts, and that they
speak to him the things which they sincerely
believe. Job has been their friend. They
have honoured and loved him. We shall
lose half the value of Job if we forget this.
When he takes the course along which they
vainly try, for a time at least, to follow him,
they are surprised, grieved, overwhelmed.
They remonstrate in all singleness of purpose,
thinking they do God service. He takes
their remonstrances in bad part, and for the
reason we have seen : there was not enough
of the milk of human kindness in the philo-
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Zophar the Ordinary Soul
sophy with which they sought to sustain
his failing spirit. He replies to them, it
must be admitted, roughly, contemptuously.
From the first he is so hurt by their academic
discussion of his sorrows that he does not
once manifest gratitude for their visit or
respect for themselves. And they allow
themselves to be carried off their feet by
chagrin, mortification, offended pride. They
are carried out of themselves by these
emotions. They cease to be theologians,
philosophers, teachers of truth. They are
merely very angry men who say things
which are not only spiteful but silly.
It would not be superfluous to point the
moral. The overseer of souls " must be
without reproach . . . temperate, sober-
minded, orderly . . . apt to teach, no brawler,
no striker, but gentle, not contentious " x —
in short, just such a one as neither Eliphaz
nor Bildad has proved himself to be.
2. They fail to heed their own teaching.
Through long speeches which for very
weariness one forbears to quote they have
1 i Timothy iii. 2, 3.
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The Divine Drama of Job
declared that " God " is too vast a conception
for the mind of the creature to grasp. It is
not only Zophar who exclaims, " Heights of
heaven, what canst thou do ! " as he con
templates man's feeble attempt to express
the infinite. The vision of Eliphaz deepens
his intuitive conviction that man is in
significant in the presence of the Most High.
And all the learning of Bildad does but
confirm his belief that man is a worm.1 Oh,
the pity of it, the pity of it, the pity that
they did not remember something of their
over-great protesting ! Then they might
have bethought themselves of the possibility
that in a scheme of things so vast, a universe
of thought so truly immeasurable, controlled
by a God whose thought can never be less
than infinite, there might be room for
theories or truths or facts and laws which
they have not yet taken into account. It
may be true, as Mr. Chesterton would have
us believe, that the " I may be wrong "
attitude of many a weakly apologetic soul is
a blasphemy against the God within us and
1 Job xxv. 6.
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Zophar the Ordinary Soul
without. But unless the strong man is to
become a brute, crushing human hearts
beneath his knee of prayer, he must be
willing to add to his assurance that " I am
right " the large and luminous and beautiful
belief that his neighbour who differs from
him may be as right as he is ! He must be
ready, and not only ready but glad, to believe
that there are still more things in heaven and
earth than are dreamt of in his philosophy.
3. They allow their theories to over-ride
their humanity.
Admitting that their theories are con
scientiously held, ought they to treat a
bereaved and suffering man, that man their
friend, as they have done ? If the reader is
inclined to answer, " Starting from their
premises they could do no other," he may
well begin to ponder the entire problem of
Job afresh. And the answer which the
present writer suggests — and it is only a
suggestion — may carry the thinker far.
There are certain root-instincts of our human
nature which are supreme over any theory
of life no matter how intellectually conceived
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The Divine Drama of Job
or conscientiously held. Davidson finds
that under the first speech of Zophar lies
the question, " If the affirmations of a man's
conscience or of his consciousness be con
tradicted by the affirmations of God, what
does it become a man to do ? " x This
question underlies every question in Job.
It is the ground of the problem of Job. And
Davidson says that it is wise in such a case
to " raise the prior question, ' Is this supposed
affirmation of God really His affirmation ? '
or to raise the prior question on the other
side, ' Is this affirmation of conscience, which
seems opposed to the intimations of God, a
true affirmation of conscience ? ' " This is
wise, but when the prior question has been
raised, and still the apparent contradiction
waits, waits and will not go away, is theory
(the " supposed affirmation of God ") or
what has just been termed "a root-instinct
of our human nature " (the " supposed
affirmation of conscience ") to be given right
of way ? We shall be better and wiser men
and women for believing that tenderness,
1 A. B. Davidson, Job ; comment on chapter xi.
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Zophar the Ordinary Soul
sympathy, compassion, generosity, brotherly
love, and a flaming pity will still be counted
Godlike when every theory about them has
crumbled into dust. "The heart has its
reasons," and the fruit of the spirit is love,
joy, peace, long-suffering, kindness, goodness,
faithfulness, meekness, self-control ; against
such there is no " theory " — and no law.1
1 Galatians v. 22, 23.

97

VII
THE INTERVENTION OF ELIHU

99 \

VII
THE INTERVENTION OF ELIHU
The three friends of Job have failed. They
have failed to convict him of sin. They
have failed to alleviate his grief. They have
failed to justify the ways of God to men.
The weakness of the case made out by them
has become more and more apparent as the
controversy has run on. This is the design
of the author. He means us to see and
feel that the older interpretations of the
problem of pain break down as soon as they
are brought to the test of detailed and
careful examination. He succeeds perfectly
in his intention.
He succeeds too well. The unsatisfactory
nature of the speeches was just as obvious
to Hebrew readers as it is to Christian. It
was as clear to the third or fourth century
IOI

The Divine Drama of Job
b.c as to the twentieth a.d. And some later
author, of lower inspiration, boldly took
upon himself to construct a stronger polemic.
He attempted to enter into the spirit of the
drama. He created another character. He
called him Elihu. He represented him as a
deeply interested auditor who had listened
with amazement and growing anger to the
impotent discourses of the three friends.
And he placed upon the lips of Elihu the
arguments which, to his mind, come nearer
to a solution of the problem than those
advanced by Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar.1
The Contribution of Elihu.
Elihu is more than angry. "Then was
kindled the wrath of Elihu . . . against
Job was his wrath kindled . . . also against
the three friends was his wrath kindled
1 For the reasons which lead to this unqualified con
clusion the reader is referred to the larger commentaries.
A lengthy critical discussion would be outside the
purpose of the Short Course Series. W. T. Davison's
article on "Job" in Hastings' Dictionary of the Bible
should by all means be consulted.
102

The Intervention of Elihu
because they had found no answer" (chap.
xxxii. 2, 3). He is a young man, and he
explains that he has refrained from speech
because of his youth, but he finds that it
does not follow that the " great " are wise
or that the aged understand justice (vers.
6-10). He has listened with what patience,
with what show of respect was possible
(vers. 11, 12); he has been amazed and
humiliated by the dialectical victory which
they have allowed Job to win (vers. 15,
16), and now he simply must speak :
" For I am fall of words ;
The spirit within me constraineth me.
Behold, my breast is as wine which hath no vent ;
Like new wine-skins it is ready to burst." 1
He has no doubt of his own inspiration,
none as to the finality of his great deliver
ances :
" The Spirit of God hath made me,
And the breath of the Almighty giveth me life.
If thou canst, answer thou me ;
Set thy words in order before me, stand forth." 2
1 Chap, xxxii. 18, 19. 2 Chap, xxxiii. 4, 5.
103

The Divine Drama of Job
And again :
" Suffer me a little, and I will show thee ;
For I have yet somewhat to say on God's behalf.
I will fetch my knowledge from afar,
And will ascribe righteousness to my Maker.
For truly my words are not false ;
One that is perfect in knowledge is with thee." 1
And throughout he speaks in the same tone.
We are bound to ask what contribution
he makes to the discussion of the tremen
dous theme on which our minds are busy.
And we find that he really is in possession
of one great idea which the friends have
not brought out with any distinctness.
They have insisted that suffering is punish
ment, and that punishment is retributive.
Elihu, not less convinced than they that
suffering is punishment, holds that it may
be and often is curative. The friends have
all along maintained that such retributive
punishment is compatible with the divine
justice, is, indeed, demanded by it. Elihu
affirms that it is compatible with divine love
and tenderness, and is the outcome of these.
1 Chap, xxxvi. 2-4.
IO4

The Intervention of Elihu
He has earlier stated that God draws near to
man in dreams and in visions of the night
for the purpose of warning him against sin
and deterring him from it.
" In a dream, in a vision of the night,
When deep sleep falleth upon men,
In slumberings upon the bed ;
Then he openeth the ears of men,
And sealeth their instruction,
That he may withdraw man from his purpose,
And hide pride from man ;
He keepeth back his soul from the pit,
And his life from perishing by the sword." 1
This is a great conception, and it is rendered
greater and more gracious by his belief that
when such visions fail and the interpretation
of them, when a man has gone down to sin,
then God draws near to him, even the third
time, in chastisement, in sickness, and
affliction, because God wills
" To bring back his soul from the pit,
That he may be enlightened with the light of the
living." 2
1 Chap, xxxiii. 15-18. 2 Chap, xxxiii. 30.
105

The Divine Drama of Job
The Grace of Chastisement.
Let us never be tempted to think lower
things of the government of God. "No
chastisement seemeth for the present to be
joyous," and few of us can find joy in it.
But chastisement is mercy. Punishment is
grace. It is good of God and good to us to
punish us when we go wrong. If we refuse
to be held by the silken cords of His affec
tion, then it is kind of Him and kind to us
to reveal to us by the lightning flashes the
abysses toward which our steps are tending.
The author of the Letter to the Hebrews
thought that "it is a fearful thing to fall
into the hands of the Living God." Even
if " the hands of the Living God " represent
to us only catastrophe and terror, then we
may be very sure that it would be a far more
fearful thing to fall out of them. If we
could sin with a hard heart and a determined
purpose and no stroke fall upon us, if we
could sow to the flesh without reaping cor
ruption, and sow the wind of unlawful
desire without reaping the whirlwind of
1 06

The Intervention of Elihu
retribution, it would be ill with us and not
well, it would be cruel to us, not kind.
And it is all of the mercy of our God that
when we refuse to serve Him " with joyful-
ness, and with gladness of heart, by reason
of the abundance of all things," then He
causes us " to serve the enemies that the
Lord shall send against thee, in hunger
and in thirst, and in nakedness, and in
want of all things " ; and it is for our
good and for our salvation that in such a
case He " puts a yoke of iron " upon our
neck.1 It is too late in the day for us to be
afraid of the love of God or of the implica
tions of our own Evangel. The theology
of the middle ages contended in the mind
of Dante against his large humanity. Over
the gates of hell he saw written :
"All hope abandon, ye who enter here";
and a thousand times we have quoted the
woeful words. We strangely forget that
even in Dante's view this " city of woe "
1 Deuteronomy xxviii. 47-8.
107

The Divine Drama of Job
was still an expression of God's love. The
same inscription reads :
" To rear me was the task of Power divine,
Supremest wisdom, and primeval love."
We know the " fear of the Lord " and we are
glad to know it ; knowing it we " persuade
men " *• — we do not coerce them — and we are
ourselves persuaded that deep down in the
lowest depths of the nethermost hell the love
of God goes blazing and consuming on.
The Justice of God.
In chapter xxxiv Elihu enters fully upon
his reply to Job's repeated charges against the
justice of God. He develops his argument
at great length and illustrates it in many
ways.2 But the heart of it all is this : God
and injustice together are unthinkable.
Elihu would not have known the meaning
of our phrase, "a contradiction in terms";
1 2 Corinthians v. 1 1 .
2 The preacher will do well to construct his own analy
sis of the Elihu speeches contained in chaps.xxxii  xxxvii.,
and he cannot do better than take Davidson for guide.
108

The Intervention of Elihu
yet this is what he is really saying. You
may say "God" or you may say "Justice,"
but you cannot say " God " and " Injustice "
too. They cannot be thought.
" Far be it from God that he should do wickedness,
And from the Almighty, that he should commit
iniquity" (chap, xxxiv. 10) ;
but why ?
" Yea of a surety, God will not do wickedly,
Neither will the Almighty pervert justice" (ver. 12).
Why ? Simply because God is God ! The
modern thinker may say, " But if I find
that the system under which I live is wrong,
I will not call it right ; and if the course
and constitution of nature are characterised
by cruelty and injustice, then I will not
profess that I see evidence of the rule of
a wise and benevolent God." But it would
not occur to Elihu or to his contemporaries
to speak in this way. God is : so much
is postulated. It has to be admitted before
one can enter into the discussion. And
Elihu is not wrong when he insists,
109

The Divine Drama of Job
vigorously and triumphantly, " God " and
" Injustice " are absurd ! He does not add
argument when he insists that God's bene
ficence is seen in the continued existence
of created things upon the earth, all sus
tained by His spirit and His breath :
" If he set his heart upon himself,
If he gather unto himself his spirit and his breath ;
All flesh shall perish together,
And man shall turn again unto dust" (vers. 14, 15).
But he does add emphasis. For the devout
soul of any age, learned or illiterate, feels
that without God's just rule over all the
earth admitted by the reason or realised by
faith, the universe rolls back to chaos,
" The pillared firmament is rottenness,
And earth's base built on stubble." x

The Impossibility of Injustice.
There is value in Elihu's rough and ready
method of dealing with the problem. It
1 Milton, Comus.
IIO

The Intervention of Elihu
may look like a swift cut at the gordian-
knot just because one finds that he cannot
untie it. But the method is more reasonable
than it looks. If we have once said " God,"
and said it with all our mind and soul and
strength, we have said Justice, Goodness,
Mercy, Love. The suggestion which
challenges these attributes is not thought :
it is absurdity. When we think we are
saying such things we are not saying things
at all. We are using words which cancel
each other out.
Fairbairn, in his most masterly discussions
of the Problem of Evil, affirms that "im
possibilities must exist to God as to men ;
possible things Omnipotence may achieve,
impossible things not even Omnipotence
may accomplish." And he particularises :
" These inabilities or impossibilities may be
said to be of three kinds : physical, in
tellectual, and moral. The moral inability
may be stated in the familiar phrase : 'It
is impossible for God to lie.' The in
tellectual may be represented either under
the category of thought : It is impossible
in

The Divine Drama of Job
for God to conceive the false as if it were
true ; or under the category of knowledge :
It is impossible for God to know things
that are not as if they were real things.
The physical impossibility may be expressed
in various forms : It is not open even to
God to make a part equal to the whole ; to
make the same thing both be and not be ; to
make a circle at once a circle and a square, or
to make a square out of two straight lines."1
And the point, of course, is that God
cannot make a human being who should
start as if he had a long experience behind
him or an acquired character within. So
that the experiences of life, conflict, pain,
temptation are unavoidable if there is to be
on earth such a being as man. The con
clusion is indisputable, but the explanations
about things which are impossible to Almighti-
ness are superfluous. It is simpler to say
that these " impossibilities " represent only
our own incapacity for thinking or the
inherent incapacity of words for conveying
1 Fairbairn, The Philosophy of the Christian Religion,
P- 153- 112

The Intervention of Elihu
thought. By a square we mean the space
that is enclosed by four straight lines, and
when we say that two cannot enclose a
square we are merely playing tricks with
words. The limitation is not in the power
of God but in our ability to see that we
are not seeing at all ! Nine-tenths of the
common difficulties connected with the
existence of evil slip into the background
when we remember the first law of thought,
that "a thing cannot both be and not be
at the same time." God is : that is Elihu's
postulate — and ours. In Him a deflection
from Justice, Goodness, Mercy, Love is
unthinkable. It contradicts the primary law
of thought. Love as Justice.
It is significant that Elihu, who gives fresh
emphasis and point to the contention of the
three friends as to God's unfailing justice,
is the one who brings into prominence the
mercifulness of God's approach to the man
in danger of yielding to sin, the approach
in dreams, in visions and their interpretation,
h 113

The Divine Drama of Job
and in affliction. Is it going too far, is it
ascribing to Elihu modern conceptions of
which he was incapable, if we find in the
whole of the second part of chapter xxxiii
an undefined conviction that God's justice
demands this mercifulness ? Did Elihu see
that it would not be just of God to leave
a man alone, unwarned, unsought, un
redeemed ? It is amongst the deepest notes
of the Gospel : in some unrealised way was
Elihu feeling after the truth of it ? ' If we
confess our sins, he is faithful and righteous
to forgive us our sins." 1 Righteous ! It
is just of Him to do it, and it would not
be just not to do it ! He owes it to
Himself, to the everlasting rectitude of His
holy name ! " Never in all your preaching
admit that the Atonement is demanded by
the justice of God," a theological teacher
now dead used to say to his students ;
" insist that the Atonement grows out of
God's love." 2 Yet what if God's love and
1 i John i. 9.
2 The late Thomas Goadby, Principal of the Midland
Baptist College. 114

The Intervention of Elihu
His justice are not two but one ? If His
justice is the same thing as His love, if He
loves because it is just that He should ?
When we warn men and women to beware
of God's justice and close with the offers
of His love, how we misconceive and mis
represent Him ! Because He is just we can
trust His love, for ever and for ever we
can trust the love of a God who is just.
" Thank God that God shall judge my soul, not
man !
I marvel when they say,
' Think of that awful Day — ¦
No pitying fellow-sinner's eyes shall scan
With tolerance thy soul,
But His who knows the whole,
The God whom all men own is wholly just.'
Hold thou that last word dear,
And live untouched by fear.
He knows with what strange fires He mixed this
dust.
The heritage of race,
The circumstance and place
Which make us what we are — were from His hand,
That left us, faint of voice,
Small margin for a choice.
He gave, I took : shall I not fearless stand ?
"5

The Divine Drama of Job
Hereditary bent
That hedges in intent
He knows, be sure, the God who shaped thy brain,
He loves the souls He made ;
He knows His own hand laid
On each the mark of some ancestral stain.
Not souls severely white,
But groping for more light,
Are what Eternal Justice here demands.
Fear not ; He made thee dust.
Cling to that sweet word — 'Just.'
All's well with thee if thou art in just hands." 1
1 Anna Reeve Aldrich.

116

VIII
THE SPEECHES OF JEHOVAH

117

VIII
THE SPEECHES OF JEHOVAH
" Gird up now thy loins like a man," is
the peremptory call of Jehovah when He
"answers Job out of the whirlwind." It is
an echo of the demand which the author
must have made upon himself as he ap
proached the climax of his splendid work.
He sets his nerves at a strain for the tre
mendous task which lay before him in fitting
speeches to the character of Jehovah. Upon
it he brought all his mighty powers to bear.
He gave free wing to his imagination while
calling to his aid all the knowledge of all his
world. The result is worthy of his ambi
tions, his consecration, and his toil. In this
noble book there is nothing nobler, in this
work of genius there is nothing more sub
lime, than the speeches of Jehovah.
119

The Divine Drama of Job
Quotation is difficult because of the wealth
of the whole. Where all is pure gold one
hesitates which nugget to pick up. But the
music of some of the lines will never pass
out of human speech. Phrases from this
part of Job are in our hymns, our prayers,
our sermons, and they will be treasured in
the liturgy of the Church of God for ever.
The day will never dawn in which we cease
to ascribe praises to the Almighty and Ever
lasting God who " laid the foundations of
the earth " and the corner-stone thereof —
"When the morning stars sang together,
And all the sons of God shouted for joy " ;
who alone is able to
" Bind the cluster of the Pleiades
Or loose the bands of Orion " ;
and say to the advancing sea,
" Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further ;
And here shall thy proud waves be stayed."
Truly, the author of this divine drama has
" girded up his loins like a man," and given
1 20

The Speeches of Jehovah
to the world pictures and phrases which the
world will never let die !
The "Answer" of Jehovah.
" Then Jehovah answered Job out of the
whirlwind, and said " — . What did He
say ? " Moreover, Jehovah answered Job,
and said " — . Twice the formula appears ;
but what did He say ?
Nothing, absolutely nothing, nothing that
touches the point of Job's complainings,
nothing that meets his demands, nothing
that is ad rem. He appears, as Job had
wished Him to appear, as the Creator and
Ruler of the universe, clothed upon with its
glories, its terrors, and its mysteries. He
comes to answer Job's reverently irreverent
challenges and silence objections which the
heart of the man had flung out against
the course and constitution of His world.
And He says — nothing ! He asserts what
has not been denied and proves what
nobody has called in question. And Job
is satisfied ! For Job answered Jehovah and
said : 121

The Divine Drama of Job
" Therefore have I uttered that which I understood
not,
Things too wonderful for me which I knew not . . .
Wherefore I repudiate my words 1
And repent in dust and ashes."
Herein lies no mystery. The genius of
our author has not betrayed him. His
method is true to the facts of human ex
perience. The revelation of God is made
to the heart, not to the brain : His spirit
operates within the sphere of the emotions,
and only afterwards and by way of reflex
action in the region of the intellect. With
the heart man believeth unto righteousness.
Illustrations of the working of this law in
contemporary life and literature are innumer
able. It holds good even of those processes
by which some storm-tossed soul finds peace
when one would hesitate to ascribe the result
to the leadings of God's spirit ! Hundreds
of men— the keenest intellects of the nine
teenth century — tried in one way or another
to analyse John Henry Newman's Apologia
1 Job xlii. 6, "repudiate" or "retract" my words,
not "abhor myself." 122

The Speeches of Jehovah
pro vita sua. None succeeds in doing it.
To this day nobody can say why Newman
left the Anglican Church for the Roman —
unless, of course, one is ready to give an
explanation which Newman would have
scorned. One follows with the keenest
delight, with intellectual joy and spiritual
zest, the carefully written account of his
thoughts and feelings through many years.
But when the crucial hour dawns and one
supposes that he is now to see " the moving
why " Newman made the change and how
the change satisfied his soul, one is led up to
a blank wall and left staring at it. For all
the explanation given the Apologia might as
well have remained unwritten. It would
have served to say : " Then I decided to
enter the Roman Communion." If Newman
was an inscrutable enigma to Charles Kings-
ley before the Apologia saw the light of day,
he must have been something more puzzling
still after it appeared ! And one of the really
memorable things in the fruitful annals of
the Oxford Movement and its consequences
is the fact that Gladstone, after his close and
123

The Divine Drama of Job
intimate friendship with Manning, should at
last shake his head and say in bewilderment :
" Manning was not straight ! " " Straight "
we may gladly concede such conduct essen
tially is ; clear it certainly is not.
A more helpful illustration is found nearer
to hand. Some years ago an English journal
ist, possessed of a taking, slap-dash news
paper style, and having a large following
amongst earnest, true-hearted, but uneducated
young men and women, galvanised into a
show of life the old Bradlaugh-Ingersoll
materialism which had been practically lost
sight of on both sides of the Atlantic before
the death of those two men. There was
one good result. A host of Christian con
troversialists were quickly in the field, and
these assaults upon faith were repelled with
a vigour and effectiveness which flung into
bold relief the feebleness and folly of the
atheistic propaganda. Amongst the replies
was a volume entitled Religious Doubts of the
Democracy. The writers, fifteen in number,
included Mr. Chesterton, Mr. George W. E.
Russell, and Dr. Fry. Three of the writers
124

The Speeches of Jehovah
gave an account of their own doubts and
conquest of doubt. They told how they
had lost faith and how they fought their way
back to it. Two were working men, one a
trained thinker, the headmaster of a public
school. Their stories are admirably told —
only, one is little wiser when he has read
them ! The precise thing which for each
one laid doubt low and brought back the
soul to God is still to seek. Each one is
satisfied, as Job is satisfied, not because God
has supplied the ground of intellectual assent
to dogma, but because He has revealed
Himself to the waiting heart. He has
"answered" out of the whirlwind.
The Value of Christian Evidences.
So understood, and so interpreted, this
section of Job raises for us the question of
the value of that form of apologetic known
as "Christian evidences."
Every apologetic is relative, relative to the
individual to whom it is addressed, to his
temperament, his training, the stage of
development he has reached, and the mood
125

The Divine Drama of Job
in which it finds him. When the preacher
is asked for " evidences of Christianity," it
would be a perfectly proper thing for him to
ask, " What sort of evidence do you want ? "
For it is as important to know the sort of
evidence the inquirer wants as to know the
sort he needs. Yet in the long run it will
be found that the value of " evidences " is
slight. They rarely produce fruits of holi
ness. Superior to the reasonings and con
clusions of all logic are the deliverances of
our human affection. We love, but we can
with difficulty say why we love. To this
day the lover finds no newer answer to the
familiar question, " Why do you love me ? "
than the time-honoured formula, "Because
you are you ! " And the one way which
God has provided for the discovery of
Himself is that of a powerful emotional
yearning toward goodness. If a man willeth
to do His will, he shall know of the teaching.1
Nevertheless, good work may be done by
the Christian apologist who can show the
objector that his objections are not final.
1 John vii. 17.
126

The Speeches of Jehovah
The doubter may be made to feel that his
objections carry him too far ; that they may
be urged with equal strength against the
things of which he is most deeply persuaded ;
and that if he will follow where they lead he
may end in denying everything. This is
the Butler method in the famous Analogy.
Hugh Price Hughes was in the habit of
saying that the Analogy had never " saved a
soul " since it was written. In his sense of
the phrase, it was not intended to " save a
soul." It said to men of a certain day who
professed a certain half-religious theory of
the universe, " You decline to accept Christi
anity because of specific objections ; yet
those objections can be urged with precisely
the same force against the philosophy you
hold and defend. This is not reasonable."
The principle is sound, and the application
of it is dangerous only because the person
who has taken refuge in a half-faith may be
driven to say, " True ! and I will abandon
the remnant of faith to which I was cling
ing ! " Gladstone, whose admiration for
Bishop Butler knew no bounds, used the
127

The Divine Drama of Job
method in homely fashion to far better
purpose than his great teacher did. For he
insisted that such objections as were urged
against Christianity could be urged against
things which no human being can give up —
and live ! His argument is unanswerable : —
" For Doubt I have a sincere respect, but
Doubt and Scepticism are different things.
I contend that the sceptic is of all men on
earth the most inconsistent and irrational.
He uses a plea against religion which he
never uses against anything he wants to do
or any idea he wants to embrace — viz., the
want of demonstrative evidence. Every day
and all day long he is acting on evidence not
demonstrative : he eats the dish he likes
without certainty that it is not poisoned ; he
rides the horse he likes without certainty
that the animal will not break his neck ; he
sends out of the house a servant he suspects
without demonstration of guilt ; he marries
the woman he likes with no absolute know
ledge that she loves him ; he embraces the
political opinion that he likes, perhaps with
out any study at all, certainly without
128

The Speeches of Jehovah
demonstrative evidence of its truth. But
when he comes to religion he is seized with
a great intellectual scrupulosity, and demands
as a pre-condition of homage to God what
everywhere else he dispenses with, and then
ends with thinking himself more rational
than other people."1
The Soul Subdued by Vastness.
So Job is silenced before he is satisfied.
And he is silenced by a vision of the vastness
of the universe. Before his eyes the limit
less panorama of nature is unrolled, and as
his gaze reaches from wonder to wonder and
from glory to glory his confidence in his
own right or power to " contend " with the
Most High weakens within him. Jehovah
" answers " him out of the whirlwind,
answers with questions, with demands, with
merciless, dominating inquiries which strip
him of the last vestige of " superiority " in
which he had clothed himself as with a
garment, and leave him silent and ashamed :
1 Gladstone's Letters on Church and Religion (edited by
D. C. Lathbury), vol. ii. pp. 77-78.
I 129

The Divine Drama of Job
" Hast thou commanded the morning since thy days
began,
And caused the dayspring to know its place ?
Hast thou entered into the springs of the sea ?
Or hast thou walked in the recesses of the deep \
Have the gates of death been revealed unto thee ?
Where is the way to the dwelling of light ?
And as for darkness, where is the place thereof?
Doubtless thou knowest, for thou wast then born,
And the number of thy days is great ! "
The irony is terrible. Is it deserved ? At
least, it does its work. Job is overwhelmed
by the universe. These things belong only
unto God :
" I know that thou canst do all things,
And that no purpose of thine can be restrained."
He repeats Jehovah's question,
" Who is this that hideth counsel without knowledge r "
And the guilty one stands self-confessed : it
is himself !
An English poet translates the wonder
130

The Speeches of Jehovah
and the awe of Job into the terms of modern
science. Astronomy has made more vast the
vastness which overwhelmed and silenced
Job. To the devout soul it has made
"doubt" still more untenable.
" And thro' all the clear spaces above — oh wonder !
oh glory of Light ! —
Came forth myriads on myriads of worlds, the shining
host of the night, —
The vast forces and fires that know the same sun and
centre as we ;
The faint planets which roll in vast orbits round suns
we shall never see ;
The rays which had sped from the first, with the
awful swiftness of light,
To reach only then, it might be, the confines of
mortal sight :
Oh, wonder of Cosmical Order! oh, Maker and
Ruler of all,
Before whose Infinite greatness in silence we worship
and fall !
Could I doubt that the Will which keeps this great
Universe steadfast and sure
Might be less than His creatures thought, full of
goodness, pitiful, pure ?
131

The Divine Drama of Job
Could I dream that the Power which keeps those
great suns circling round,
Took no thought for the humblest life which flutters
and falls to the ground ? "
And the conclusion is the last word of
wisdom as it is the first of religion,
" Oh, Faith ! thou art higher than all." x
The Epilogue.
The epilogue, it has already been pointed
out, "adds nothing to the grandeur of the
poem." It adds nothing to our understand
ing of life's mysteries and nothing to the
faith that soars above them. It is a part of
the " machinery " of the drama. For the
purpose of his drama, by way of bringing
his characters upon the stage, our author
exposed Job to calamities and sorrows. The
purpose accomplished, the case tried and
verdict rendered, poetic justice demands that
Job should be restored to his former estate
of prosperity and recompensed for his losses.
It is done with oriental completeness and
1 Lewis Morris, Evensong.
132

The Speeches of Jehovah
lavishness. Job lives a hundred and forty
years longer, lives in the smiles of fortune,
and at last, full of years and honour, comes
to his grave, as Eliphaz hoped he might,
" Like as a shock of grain cometh in in its season."
But it would have been better for us if Job
had never been born of the brain of one of
earth's noblest thinkers than for us to think
that this, in the end, is to be the reward of
righteousness. Let us believe this and act
upon our belief and then the Satan's question
may justly be addressed to us : Do we serve
God for nought ? Bread was never the
reward of virtue. Houses and land, wealth
in mounded heaps, and the delights of the
children of men are not the recompense of
faith and hope and love. The great man of
letters whose study of Job remains, when all
is said and done, the most searching and
suggestive and satisfying in the literature of
two continents, asks us to fling scorn upon
so base and debasing a view of man's rela
tions with the Infinite. . And as these ex
positions opened with his characterisation of
J33

The Divine Drama of Job
the divine drama, they may well close with
his characterisation of religion : —
"If Christianity had never borne itself
more loftily than this, do we suppose that
those fierce Norsemen who had learnt, in the
fiery war-songs 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 civilisation, 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
134

The Speeches of Jehovah
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, ... it was to be with
Christ — to lose themselves in Him." 1
These words are true and righteous
altogether. In the truth of them our souls
abide. From the reading of this heroic poem
we shall rise in heroic mood if it has bred
in us the confidence that the " reward " of
Christianity is — Christ.
1 Froude, Short Studies on Great Subjects : The Book
of Job.

135

APPENDIX
Some Additional Reading
In the foregoing pages and footnotes the
author has cited some of the best and most
easily accessible literature on the Book of
Job. No one who is designing a course of
lectures on this " greatest poem of ancient or
modern times " could do better than turn
to the works so justly recommended : — J. A.
Froude's Short Studies on Great Subjects
(1867) ; A. B. Davidson's The Book of Job, in
the " Cambridge Bible for Schools " (1884), or
his article "Job" in the Ency. Brit, eleventh
edition ; W. T. Davison's The Wisdom
Literature (1894), or his article "Job" in
Hastings' Dictionary of the Bible. These
all supply expository material of the highest
practical value, and may well be consulted
*37

Appendix
by the teacher or preacher in the framing
of his discourse.
To these may be added three other
works of the same outstanding character.
(i) A. M. Fairbairn's The City of God, pp.
143-189 (1886) — a fine appreciation of the
" nameless man," who so lived and wrestled
that "the thoughts that possessed him, the
faith that consoled him, and the hopes that
transmuted and glorified his sorrows, are set
here as to everlasting music." (2) T. K.
Cheyne's admirable article on " Job " in the
Ency. Biblica — a study which, with all its
emendations and grammatical details (warning
Paseks, and the rest) is yet pre-eminently
lucid and suggestive, and never fails to
do justice to that "inextinguishable heart-
religion " which is surely one of the leading
features of this great psychological drama.
(3) As a perfect mine of expository material,
however, we must make special mention of the
latest study in this age-long problem — James
Strahan's supremely able and spiritually alive
volume, The Book of Job (19 13). For the
purposes of a wise and practical exposition,
138

Appendix
based upon a sound and illuminating exegesis,
we hail this contribution to Old Testament
literature as one of the best books of its
kind. Open it where one may, one in
stinctively feels that he is under the guidance
of a master. Is it the description of the
writer of the poem as contained in the finely-
conceived Introduction ? " He resembles the
prophets of his race in his high and im
perious standard of right, his flaming hatred
of wrong. His expanding opinions only
intensify his moral sense. His strenuous
thinking is no less remarkable than his
consummate literary art." Or is it the sigh
of conscious rectitude, longing to come near
to God, that the maligned one may be
delivered from his judge (xxiii. 3, 7) ? We
are at once pointed to the much better
rendering of the LXX : — " so should I for
ever recover my right." "Job asks for a trial,
not in order that he may be delivered from
his Judge, but that he may hear his Judge
vindicate his innocence and give him back
his good name as an everlasting possession."
Once more, is it the thought of death ex-
139

Appendix
tinguishing the faint gleam of an after-life,
as depicted in xiv. 14, and forcing the
patriarch to exclaim —
" Thou prevailest for ever against him, and he passeth ;
Thou changest his countenance, and sendest him
away " ?
He passeth! The attention of the reader
is directed at once to the significance of this
figure, and he is asked to see in it the
inspiring teaching of Revelation, no less than
the sombre language of nature. " But if
Revelation consents to retain the word
' passeth,' she does so only on the condition
that she shall be allowed to give it an entirely
new content ; for her teaching is that ' we
have passed out of death into life' (1 John
iii. 14), so that at the last 'there is no death,
what seems so is transition.' The ' Passing
of Arthur ' is not a descent, dreaded by the
ancients, into an underworld of darkness,
but a going to meet the dawn." Or, finally,
if we turn to the great crucial passage in
chapter xix., and read —
" Oh that my words were now written !
Oh that they were inscribed in a book ! "
140

Appendix
Could anything be more suggestive than
the comment — " how splendidly his idea has
been realised ! His singular fancy of a
testimony in the rocks could not be gratified,
but he has his apologia — his monumentum cere
perennius — in a book which is the master
piece of Hebrew poetic genius."
All this is biblical exegesis at his best ;
and no one should attempt the exposition
of the Book of Job without consulting the
wealth of homiletical hint and sound Bible
teaching contained in this painstaking and
admirable volume. J. A.

141

INDEX

A. SCRIPTURE PASSAGES

PAGE

PAGE
Gen. iv. 6, 7 ¦
. 46
Job xxxiii. 4-5
103
Deut. xxviii. 47-48
. 107
,, xxxiii. 15-18
105
1 Sam. xvi. 7 •
• 3°
„ xxxiii. 30 .
I05 ff.
„ xxv. 10
• 74
,, xxxiv. 10 .
109
Isa. vi. 9-10 .
• 90
,, xxxvi. 2-4
104
Hos. vi. 1 . .
• 57
,, xiii. 6 . .
122
Job i. io-n .
39
Ps. xxxvii. 1-8
14
„ iv. 14-17 .
¦ 54
„ Ixxiii. 16 .
15
, xi. 7-8 . .
. 82
John vii. 17
126
, xi. 15-19 .
. 84
„ viii. 44 .
43
, xiii. 12
• 72
2 Cor. iv. 17 .
46
, xiii. 15
• 23
,, V. II .
108
, xix. 21 .
. 89
Gal. v. 22-23 •
97
, xix. 25-27
. 28
Eph. vi. 12
36
, xxii. 6, 7, 9
. 62
Col. iii. 4 . .
48
, xxiii. 3-10
• 29
1 Tim. iii. 2, 3
93
, xxv. 6 . .
• 94
Heb. x. 31 . .
106
, xxix. 7_I3
5
1 John iii. 8
48
, xxxii. .
. 103
1 John v. 16 . . .
47
B. SUI
5JECTS
Ambition, Baffled, 4,
Evil, Mystery of, 14.
Antiquity, Appeal to
*73-
Failure, 91.
Apologetics, Value 0
f, 125 ff.
Faith, Loss of, 24.
Assurance, 27.
Fault-finding, 85.
Brotherhood, 56.
Gospel-hardened, 88.
Butler's Analogy, 12;
1.
Indignation, Righteous,
57,86.
" Cant," 16.
Inhumanity, 90.
Conscience, 96.
Insinuation, 40.
C
ontroversy, Evil
,of
, 61, 92.
Justice, Divine, ic
)8ff.
143
Index

Life in God, 63.
Love as Justice, 113.
Loyalty, 24.
Martyrdom, 22.
Pain, Problem of, 14.
„ Purification through,
104.

Preacher, For the, 57, 60, 67,
7°, 83, 85.
Righteousness, Rewards of, 30.
Self-sacrifice, 42.
Sin unto death, 47.
Ultima Veritas, 31.
Uz : a land of spirit, 10.

C. QUOTATIONS

Aldrich, Anna Reeve, 1 16.
Aristophanes, 73-
Bradlaugh-Ingersoll, 124.
Byron, 45.
Carlyle, 2, 30.
Chesterton, 94.
Cox's_/b^, 61, 83.
Dante, 107.
Davidson, A. B., II, 17, 96,
108.
Davison, W. T., 12, 102.
Fairbairn, A. M., 112.
Faunce, William H. P., 77.
Froude, James Anthony, I,
I3» 134-
Gladden, Washington, 32.

Gladstone, 74, 127.
Goethe, 46.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 75.
Ingelow, Jean, 91.
Japanese " boy," 41.
Lodge, Sir Oliver, 26.
Luther, 30.
Milton, 43, no.
Morris, Lewis, 132.
Newman, John Henry, 122.
Parker's People's Bible, 83.
Prothero, 22.
Robertson, Fred. William,
86.
Seneca, 23.
Tennyson, 25.

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