de to bring him, he is to them no more than a text for
the enunciation of solemn falsehood. And even worse again, the sufferer
himself had been educated in the same creed; he, too, had been taught to
see the hand of God in the outward dispensation; and feeling from the
bottom of his heart, that he, in his own case, was a sure contradiction
of what he had learnt to believe, he himself finds his very faith in God
shaken from its foundation. The worst evils which Satan had devised
were distanced far by those which had been created by human folly.

The creed in which Job had believed was tried and found wanting, and, as
it ever will be when the facts of experience come in contact with the
inadequate formula, the true is found so mingled with the false, that
they can hardly be disentangled, and are in danger of being swept away
together.

A studied respect is shown, however, to orthodoxy, even while it is
arraigned for judgment. It may be doubtful whether the writer purposely
intended it. He probably cared only to tell the real truth; to say for
the old theory the best which could be said, and to produce as its
defenders the best and wisest men whom in his experience he had known to
believe and defend it. At any rate, he represents the three friends, not
as a weaker person would have represented them, as foolish, obstinate
bigots, but as wise, humane, and almost great men, who, at the outset,
at least, are animated only by the kindest feelings, and speak what they
have to say with the most earnest conviction that it is true. Job is
vehement, desperate, reckless. His language is the wild, natural
outpouring of suffering. The friends, true to the eternal nature of man,
are grave, solemn, and indignant, preaching their half truth, and
mistaken only in supposing that it is the whole; speaking, as all such
persons would speak and still do speak, in defending what they consider
sacred truth against the assaults of folly and scepticism. How beautiful
is their first introduction:--

'Now when Job's three friends heard of all this evil which was come upon
him, they came every one from his own place; Eliphaz the Temanite, and
Bildad the Shuhite, and Zophar the Naamathite: for they had made an
appointment together to come to mourn with him and to comfort him. And
when they lifted up their eyes afar off, and knew him not, they lifted
up their voice and wept, and they rent every one his mantle, and
sprinkled dust upon their heads towar