the singly coming messengers believed it all, as also did the
well-enduring Job. But the scriptural word does not go to say that these
things happened; but that certain emissaries said they happened. I think
the devil missed his mark--that the messengers were scared by some
abortive diabolic efforts; and that (with a natural increase of camels,
&c., meanwhile) the patriarch's paternal heart was more than compensated
at the last by the restoration of his own dear children. They were dead,
and are alive again; they were lost, and are found. Like Abraham
returning from Mount Calvary with Isaac, it was 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 the 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 these 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."

CHAPTER XV.

THE CROCK OF GOLD, ETC.

The origin of the "Crock of Gold" is so well given in a preface, written
by Mr. Butler of Philadelphia, for his American edition of my works in
1851, that I choose here to reproduce it, as below. Our cousins over the
water were characteristically very fond of the "Crock of Gold," and some
editions of "Proverbial Philosophy" were published by them as "by the
author of the 'Crock of Gold'" on the title-page, whereof I have a copy.
Moreover, it was dramatised and acted at "the Boston Museum