' he cries, 'shall wisdom be found, and where is the place of
understanding? Man knoweth not the price thereof, neither is it found
in the land of the living. The depth said it is not with me; and the sea
said it is not in me. It is hid from the eyes of all living, and kept
close from the fowls of the air.[K] God understandeth the way thereof,
and He knoweth the place thereof [He, not man, understands the mysteries
of the world which He has made]. And unto man He said, Behold! the fear
of the Lord, that is wisdom; and to depart from evil, that is
understanding.'

Here, therefore, it might seem as if all was over. There is no clearer
or purer faith possible for man; and Job had achieved it. His evil had
turned to good; and sorrow had severed for him the last links which
bound him to lower things. He had felt that he could do without
happiness, that it was no longer essential, and that he could live on,
and still love God, and cling to Him. But he is not described as of
preternatural, or at all Titanic nature, but as very man, full of all
human tenderness and susceptibility. His old life was still beautiful to
him. He does not hate it because he can renounce it; and now that the
struggle is over, the battle fought and won, and his heart has flowed
over in that magnificent song of victory, the note once more changes: he
turns back to earth to linger over those old departed days, with which
the present is so hard a contrast; and his parable dies away in a strain
of plaintive, but resigned melancholy. Once more he throws himself on
God, no longer in passionate expostulation, but in pleading humility.[L]
And then comes (perhaps, as Ewald says, it _could not_ have come
before) the answer out of the whirlwind. Job had called on God, and
prayed that he might appear, that he might plead his cause with him; and
now he comes, and what will Job do? He comes not as the healing spirit
in the heart of man; but, as Job had at first demanded, the outward God,
the Almighty Creator of the universe, and clad in the terrors and the
glory of it. Job, in his first precipitancy, had desired to reason with
him on his government. The poet, in gleaming lines, describes for an
answer the universe as it then was known, the majesty and awfulness of
it; and then asks whether it is this which he requires to have explained
to him, or which he believes himself capable of conducting. The
revelation acts on Job as the sign of the Macrocosmos on the modern