Mark Rutherford’s Deliverance

I reflect I am afraid, and trembling taketh hold on my flesh. Wherefore do the wicked live, become old, yea, are mighty in power?” They openly defy God. They say, “What is the Almighty that we should serve Him?” and yet “their bull gendereth, and faileth not, their cow calveth, and slippeth not her calf.” His friends, in order to avoid the significance of what is obvious, had explained it away by the assumption that iniquity is laid up for the children of the wicked. “His own eyes,” replies Job, “ought to see his destruction, and he himself ought to drink of the wrath of the Almighty. For what care hath he in his house after him, when the number of his months is cut off in the midst?” Good and evil “lie down alike in the dust, and the worms do cover them.” The closing verses of the chapter must be given as they stand: “Behold, I know your thoughts, and the devices that ye wrongfully imagine against me. For ye say, where is the house of the prince? and where the tent of the dwellings of the wicked? Have ye not asked them that go by the way, and do ye not know their tokens (i.e., do ye not know what travellers will tell you), that the wicked is spared at the day of destruction: they are led away at the day of wrath? who shall declare his way to his face? and who shall repay him what he hath done? He is brought to the grave, and over his tomb is watch kept. The clods of the valley are sweet unto him, and every man draws after him, and innumerable before him. How, then, comfort ye me in vain? Your answers are but falsehood.” Once more Job takes his stand on actual eyesight. He relies, too, on the testimony of those who have travelled. He prays his friends to turn away from tradition, from the idle and dead ecclesiastical reiteration of what had long since ceased to be true, and to look abroad over the world, to hear what those have to say who have been outside the narrow valleys of Uz. Job demands of his opponents that they should come out into the open universe. If they will but lift up their eyes across the horizon which hitherto has hemmed them in, what enlargement will not thereby be given to them! Herein lies the whole contention of the philosophers against the preachers. The philosophers ask nothing more than that the conception of God should be wide enough to cover what we see; that it shall not be arbitrarily framed to serve certain ends; that it shall be inclusive of everything which is discovered beyond Uz and its tabernacles; and if the conclusions we desire cannot be drawn from that conception, so much the worse for them.

Inexpressibly touching is the last verse but one. It is a revelation of the inmost heart striving to be at peace with death. Not one grain of comfort is sought outside, and it is this which makes it so precious. There is not even a hint of a hope. All is drawn from within, and is solid and real. To this we can come when religion, dreams, metaphysics, all fail. The clods of the valley shall be sweet even to us. Why should we complain, why should we be in mortal fear! We do but go the path which the poorest, the weakest, the most timid have all trodden; which the poorest, the weakest, the most timid for millions of years will still tread. Every man draws after us, and innumerable have drawn thither before us. None who have passed have ever rebelled or repented, nor shall we. Job, in building on rest, and on community, has struck the adamant which cannot be shaken.

So strong is the superstition of the friends that Eliphaz now advances to a creation of crimes which Job must have committed. It is more easy to believe him to be a sinner than that their creed can be shaken. “Thou hast taken,” says Eliphaz, “a pledge from 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. But as for the mighty man, he had the earth; and the honourable man dwelt in it. Thou hast sent widows away empty, and the arms of the fatherless have been broken. Therefore snares are round about thee, and sudden fear troubleth thee.” There was no shadow of truth in the accusation. Job seems, on the contrary, to have been remarkable for the virtues which were the very opposite of these sins. It is worth while to notice how our measure of wrong has altered. To Eliphaz, wrong, when he wishes specially to name it, is a class of actions, not one of which is to us accounted an offence, except by certain sentimental persons. A man nowadays may be a good Christian and a good citizen, and do every one of these deeds which in Job’s time were so peculiarly reprehensible, and which are taken, as we shall see afterwards, with Job’s full consent, as the very type of misdoing. Eliphaz, as before observed, is the church. But what a world that must have been, when the church’s anathemas were reserved for him who exacteth pledges from his brother, who neglected the famishing, and who paid undue respect to the great. Job’s answer is an indignant denial of the charge. It is not worth an answer, and again he implores God to speak to him. “Behold, I go forward, but He is not there; and backward, but I cannot perceive Him; on the right hand where He doth work, but I cannot behold Him: He hideth Himself on the right hand, that I cannot see Him.” Job adds to the last repetition, however, of his complaint something which is