the utterance of that voice! what immensity of self-conscious power
what authority and dignity--the dignity of infinite integrity:
"Shall mortal man be more just than God? Shall man be more pure than
his Maker?"

How the night is full of a sudden law of proportion. Mortal man and
eternal God. You feel the distance widening and widening between
them there in the stillness of the night. The justice of man! man!
the unjust--the law breaker; man, who is of yesterday and is gone
to-morrow--mortal man, more just than he of whom it is said,
"Justice and judgment are the habitation of his throne." Fallen man,
man full of iniquity, shall he be more pure than he who made him; he
who breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and made him a
living soul; he whose name is holiness and righteousness and very
truth? As the question lingers man shrivels and sinks into the dust,
and the whole night is filled with stillness--with the stillness and
immensity of the all-pervading and holy God.

Read the thirty-eighth and thirty-ninth chapters.

They record the highest reaches of human language, so great that our
own version cannot dim their splendor. Nothing ever written
surpasses them, not only in the felicity of expression, but in the
sense of deity pervading them. Each succeeding verse sustains the
other and, at the last, you feel that God, very God, indeed, has
spoken.

The Almighty answers the complaining Job.

He answers him, not out of the midst of a deep, unbroken calm, but
out of the whirlwind; and yet, from the centre of that mighty vortex
of unlimited force and energy and power, the voice comes forth with
the calmness of one who knows himself superior to the whirlwind and
the storm.

"Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge?"

This is the abrupt and sudden question. It is the fitting question
of him who knoweth the end from the beginning. In the very asking of
it all the boasted knowledge, the attainment, the self-consciousness
and vanity of man fade away, and man himself is as nothing--God
alone remains upon the vision--all knowing--all wise--supreme.

This Bible is a book of history.

It will spend page after page in describing the doings of a
rebellious king, and then compress the story of twenty-five hundred
years into a few dozen lines, but will do this in such a way, by
means of exact symbols, that the twenty-five centuries thus
compressed will reveal a clearer outline and fuller vista