destiny were not, so to speak, produced beyond the fatal chasm of the grave. Zeus, the god of the living, was not the god of the dead, and had no authority, no power over them; so that earthly piety brought no reward in the under-world, and impiety no necessary or special punishment. Hades had its own proper deities-stern, pitiless, implacable-themselves but little happier than the subjects of their rule, and utterly unlike the bright and joyous gods who ruled in heaven. But this primitive and purely negative conception could not long maintain itself. In the later legends of the inappeasable tortures of Tantalus and Sisyphus on the one hand, and of Minos, the impartial judge, on the other, the idea of moral retribution began to creep in and to connect this life with the next. But it was not until the great poets, such as Eschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and, above all, Pindar, and the great philosophers, above all, Plato, lit up the whole realm of Hades with the light of an eternal righteousness, of a just and impartial doom awaiting all the sons of men, that the thought of a future life really laid hold on the Greek mind and became a moral power, a power making for righteousness, among them. And this, I apprehend, was the very light which had now dawned on the darkened mind of Job (cf. Chapter xvii. 13-16), making a new day in it. Not the defined Christian hope of immortality for the whole man, not an incredible or incomprehensible anticipation of the resurrection of the body; but a large, bright, though indefinite, assurance of an after-life morally connected with the present life, in which the justice often denied men here would run its full course and mount to its proper close this, I take it, was the hope and conviction of Job, this the immense spoil which he now carries off from his conflict with death and despair. 1 See Professor Fairbairn's Essay on the Belief in Immortality, Part iii. in "Studies in the Philosophy of Religion and History." SECTION V. THE THIRD COLLOQUY. CHAPTERS XXII.-XXVI. THE argument we have so long pursued is now evidently drawing to a close. Within the limits as yet prescribed for it, it is, indeed, utterly exhausted. New premisses must be introduced into it, as they soon will be by Elihu, before any real conclusion can be reached. For the present all that deserves the name of argument is at an end, and this third Colloquy which is virtually a duel between Eliphaz and Job -does but mark and record that significant fact. Bildad, as sententious as ever, has nothing but a trite generality to contribute (Chapter xxv.), which, as if conscious of its irrelevance, he tricks out in a vague magniloquence very unusual with him. "Bitter Zophar, with his blatant tongue," is speechless with indignation or confusion. The deep vexation of his inmost soul Hath set a dumb arrest upon his tongue. When Job pauses for him to speak, he has nothing to say. So long as Job simply questioned or denied any dogma of the accepted creed, Zophar could at least reaffirm it and denounce him for arraigning it. But now that Job has ceased to be negative, and become constructive, now that out of the very ruins created by despair he has built up the great hope of a retributive life beyond the grave, he has soared into a region into which, as authority had laid down no chart of it, Zophar is unable to follow him. This, probably, is the reason why Zophar sits mute. Possibly, too, he feels that there is no need for him to speak, since Eliphaz has already said all that it was in his own heart to say, and said it very much in his own manner. For, 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 type. Eliphaz, the prophet, sinks wellnigh to the level of Zophar, the bigot. He does, indeed, make some brief show of argument (Chap. xxii. 2-4). He attempts to justify that inference of guilt from punishment, of sin from suffering, for which he had so long and earnestly contended,-arguing that, since God cannot be biassed by the considerations which disturb human judgments, his awards must be just, however unjust they may look. But he feels that he has not met the facts adverse to that inference which Job has adduced, and that he cannot meet them. And so, 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 (Chap. xxii. 5-11), for which he could allege no shadow of proof, and of which the wellknown tenour of Job's life was a sufficient refutation. In short, he holds fast to his dogma that sin is the sole cause of suffering, and infers from Job's suffering what his sins must have been in order to vindicate it. He paints him as he ought to have been according to his dogma, not as he knew him to be in fact. For it is inconceivable that Job, living in the fierce light which beat upon the chieftain of a great clan, could have concealed from his neighbours the crimes of cruelty and violence with which Eliphaz charges him; and it is therefore impossible to believe that even Eliphaz himself did not know in his heart that these charges were untrue. No doubt he honestly believed that Job must have sinned, and sinned heinously, to provoke the calamities by which he was overwhelmed; but that he had "stripped the naked," and starved the famishing, and broken the arms of the orphan, in short, that he had been the tyrant instead of the friend of his clan, would have been as incredible to his accuser as it is to us, if he had not been blinded by the heat of controversy and the mortifications of public defeat. But, let Eliphaz say what he will, Job is no longer to be moved either to his former indignation or to his former despair. The time is past in which he can be much disturbed by anything that men can say against him. What he is in himself their thoughts of him cannot transpose. Angels are bright still, though the brightest fell; Though all foul things should wear the brows of grace, Yet grace must still look so. And, however "foul" he may look to them, he is content so that God recognize his innocence. Now, moreover, that, instead of flinging out ambiguous hints and dubious reproaches, Eliphaz formulates distinct charges against him, he can afford to treat them with disdain. His inward feeling as he listens to these monstrous and incredible slanders is, I would I could Quit all offences with as clear excuse Myself of those which I am charged withal. But he is not eager or anxious to purge himself of them. In the next section, "the Soliloquy," he does indirectly refute them, indeed, but for the present he disdains even to deny them. He calmly pursues his own course, and is no longer blown about by any wind the Friends can raise. Once more, and now more earnestly than ever, he longs to meet God face to face, for he is no longer afraid of God (Chap. xxiii. 6); nor does his assured conviction that God will vindicate him in the life to come at all abate his desire for an immediate vindication. “Job is no more pacified under present wrong by the vision of future rectification of it than Paul was satisfied under present sin by the vision of future redemption from it." Just as under the pressure of sin the Apostle cried out, "O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me?" so, under the pressure of injustice, Job cried out, "O that I knew where I might find him! I would press up to his very seat" (Chap. xxiii. 3, 4). And though he cannot "find" God, he is sure that God has found him; that He will hereafter acquit him (Chap. xxiii. 7); and that, when God has fully assayed him, he shall come forth from the trial as gold from the fire (Chap. xxiii. 10). What really occupies and dominates his thoughts throughout this Colloquy is not his personal fate, but “the common problem-yours, mine, every one's." As in Chapter xxi. he had been startled by the fact that, under the rule of a righteous God, whole classes of lawless and godless men were suffered to spend their lives in ease and mirth to the very end, so now he is startled and perplexed by the facts that, under the same severe yet gracious rule, there are large classes of men who, for no sins of their own, are condemned to lives of the most sordid and unrelieved misery (Chap. xxiv. 1-12); and still other classes who addict themselves to vice and crime despite the detection and shame and ruin which dog their footsteps (Chap. xxiv. 13-24). That very problem, or, rather, that terrible series of problems, suggested to us by the existence of oppressed races and criminal classes, so seizes on the mind of Job, now that he too is miserable and oppressed, as to divert him from the sense of his own affliction. With the magnanimity we have seen to be habitual to him, he passes out beyond the limits of his personal interests and experiences into the wants, conditions, wrongs of the toiling and oppressed myriads, and by this philosophic breadth of contemplation abates and dulls the edge of his proper misery. 1. ELIPHAZ TO JOB. Even the prophetic spirit of Eliphaz was, as I have just said, so perverted by his dogmatic prepossessions, as not only to convince him that Job had fallen into some heinous sin, but also to prompt him to charge his friend with wanton and public crimes which it was impossible that he should have committed. And yet, when we come to look at his speech more closely, we find that the main lines of thought which he pursues in it are true and valuable in themselves, and become false only in the application he makes of them. In nothing, indeed, is the amazing power of the consummate artist to whom we owe this poem more apparent than in the fact that, even when he makes the speakers in his drama wholly wrong in intention and in the moral they point, he |
