essential unity of fearing the Lord and wisdom. To be wise is to fear Him. Wisdom, the wisdom searched out by Him in His creation of the universe, when it is brought down to man, is morality. Whatever we may think of the date of this portion of the book, there is no question as to the three following chapters. Job protests, not merely his innocence, but his active righteousness, and remembers his past prosperity. He dwells upon the time when he laughed away his friends’ trouble, and they were not able to darken the cheerfulness of his countenance. Immovable he was when fear was abroad, and the hearts of men were shaken. “I chose out their way, and sat chief, and dwelt as a king in the army, as one that comforteth the mourners.” The humanities of these chapters reveal the best side of the Semitic race. They are the burden of the prophets—of Micah, who invokes God’s vengeance on those who “covet fields, and take them by violence; and houses, and take them away: so they oppress a man and his house, even a man and his heritage;” and they are the soul of the Revolution, which will one day make foolish the modern quarrels over forms of government. Job goes down to the very root of the matter. “Did not He that made me in the womb make him? and did not one fashion us in the womb? If I have withheld the poor from their desire, or have caused the eyes of the widow to fail; or have eaten my morsel myself alone, and the fatherless hath not eaten thereof (for from my youth he was brought up with me, as with a father, and I have guided her from my mother’s womb): if I have seen any perish for want of clothing, or any poor without covering; if his loins have not blessed me, and if he were not warmed with the fleece of my sheep; if I have lifted up my hand against the fatherless, when I saw my help in the gate: then let mine arm fall from my shoulder-blade, and mine arm be broken from the bone.” Again, let it be laid to heart that the obligations, the breach of which was a “terror” to him, are not one of them legal obligations, and not one of them moral obligations in the modern sense of the word. The races to whom we owe the Bible were cruel in war; they were revengeful; their veins were filled with blood hot with lust; they knew no art, nor grace, nor dialectic, such as Greece knew, but one service they at least have rendered to the world. They have preserved in their prophets and poets this eternal verity—
He that made me in the womb made him—and have proclaimed with divine fury a divine wrath upon all those who may be seduced into forgetfulness of it. In discernment of the real breadth and depth of social duty, nothing has gone beyond the book of Job. Much of it ought to be engraved upon brass and set upon pillars throughout the land, as a perpetual reminder of the truth as between man and man. In one of the shires of this country stands, or used to stand, a tablet with a mark on it twenty or thirty feet above the level of the river which runs beneath, and on the tablet it is recorded, incredible almost to all present inhabitants, that on a certain day years ago the water reached that mark. So with the book of Job. It is a monument testifying, although its testimony is now hardly believable, that this was a rich man’s notion of duty; and more extraordinary still, that this was his religion.
As to Elihu’s speech I have nothing to say. Whether there is sufficient philological evidence against it I am unable to determine, but the evidence supplied by the instinct of the ordinary reader is sufficient. Setting apart that it is entirely unnecessary in the progress of the poem, and that it is tame and flat compared with the other portion of it, the omission of Elihu in the prologue and the epilogue is almost decisive.
“Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind.” He makes no reference whatever to what had passed in heaven. It would have been easy, one would think, to have cleared up all Job’s doubts by telling him at once that his trials were ordained to establish his steadfastness and confound the Accuser. But no; He does not, and cannot allude to that act of the drama which had been enacted unseen. The very first words of the Almighty are the key to the whole of what follows. “Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? declare if thou hast understanding? Who hath laid the measures thereof, if thou knowest? or who hath stretched out the line upon it? Whereupon are the foundations thereof fastened? or who laid the cornerstone thereof: when the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?” The appeal is in no sense whatever to the bare omnipotence of God. He is omnipotent, but not upon His omnipotence does He rely in His divine argument with Job. Listen, for example, to such passages as these: “Who hath divided a watercourse for the overflowing of waters, or a way for the lightning of thunder; to cause it to rain on the earth, where no man is; on the wilderness, wherein there is no man; to satisfy the desolate and waste ground, and to cause the bud of the tender herb to spring forth?” Still more noteworthy, there is the ostrich, “which leaveth her eggs in the earth and warmeth them in the dust, and forgetteth that the foot may crush them, or that the wild beast may break them. She is hardened against her young ones as though they were not hers; her labour is
