nold has so vividly brought out in the Hindoo Song of Songs;
and may understand how the Church came to take it as a parable of the love
of the soul for its Heavenly Ideal, seen in the Christ.

Job, thus read, becomes a semi-dramatic poem, in which the problem of the
disconnection of goodness and good-fortune, the lack of any just ordering
of individual life, is discussed in the persons of an upright and sorely
afflicted patriarch and his three friends, who come to condole and counsel
with him. Through their interchanging colloquies, that bring up one after
another the stock theories of the age of the author, the argument moves
along without really getting on. No solution is found for the perplexing
puzzle, in which man's moral instincts beat vainly against the hard facts
of life. Once, for a moment, the thought of a future life flashes up, as
the true solution of the injustice of earth, in that thrilling cry of the
tortured soul:

I know that my Redeemer liveth,
And that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth:
And though, after my skin, worms destroy this body,
Yet out of my flesh shall I see God;
Whom I shall see for myself,
And mine eyes shall behold, and not as a stranger.

But the vision fades upon an atmosphere unready for it, and the poet does
not return to follow this clue out into the sunshine.

All the light that he can discern is in Nature's manifestations of power
and order and wisdom. From a wide range of knowledge, the poet draws
together upon the stage the wonders of creation, which, with daring
freedom, he introduces God himself as describing; until at length Job
humbles himself in an awe not uncheered by trust:

Therefore have I uttered that I understood not.
Things too wonderful for me which I knew not.

* * * * *

I have heard of Thee by the hearing of the ear;
But now mine eye seeth Thee.
Wherefore I abhor myself,
And repent in dust and ashes.

By dropping out the episode of Elihu, as an insertion of some later hand,
the movement of the poem becomes sustained and progressive. The arguments
of the Jewish theology are cleverly presented, while the swift, sure sense
of justice in the sufferer pierces all sophisms, and riddles all pious
conventionalities. The descriptions of Nature are graphic and eloquent.
The _motif_ of the drama is one that voices the thought and feeling of our
far-off age, in which m