the
Resurrection in a figure.

If to this view objection is made, that, because the boils of Job were
real, therefore, similarly real must be all his other evils; I reply,
that in the one temptation, the suffering was to be mental; in the
other, bodily. In the latter case, positive, personal pain, was the gist
of the matter: in the former, the heart might be pierced, and the mind
be overwhelmed, without the necessity of any such incurable affliction
as children's deaths amount to. God's mercy may well have allowed the
evil one to overreach himself; and when the restoration came, how double
was the joy of Job over those ten dear children.

Again, if any one will urge that, in the common view of the case, Job at
the last really has twice as many children as before, for that he has
ten old ones in heaven, and ten new ones on earth: I must, in answer,
think that explanation as unsatisfactory to us, as the verity of it
would have been to Job. Affection, human affection, is not so
numerically nor vicariously consoled: and it is, perhaps, worth while
here to have thrown out (what I suppose to be) a new view of the case,
if only to rescue such wealth as children from the infidel's sneer of
being confounded with such wealth as camels. Moreover, such a paternal
reward was anteriorly more probable.

JOSHUA.

How many of our superficial thinkers have been staggered at the great
miracle recorded of Joshua; and how few, even of the deeper sort,
comparatively, may have discerned its aptness, its science, and its
anterior likelihood: "Sun! stand thou still upon Gibeon; and thou, moon,
in the valley of Ajalon." Now, consider, for we hope to vindicate even
this stupendous event from the charge of improbability.

Baal and Ashtaroth, chief idols of the Canaanites, were names for sun
and moon. It would manifestly be the object of God and His ambassador to
cast utter scorn on such idolatry. And what could be more apt than that
Joshua, commissioned to extirpate the corrupted race, should
miraculously be enabled, as it were, to bind their own gods to aid in
the destruction of such votaries?

Again: what should Joshua want with the moon for daylight, to help him
to rout the foes of God more fiercely? Why not, according to the
astronomical ignorance of those days, let her sail away, unconsorted by
the sun, far beyond the valley of Ajalon? There was a reason, here, of
secret, unobtruded science: if the sun stopped, the moon must st