come to
naught." And has not Job's house been splintered by the tempest? And
this friend of many years is saying, "Hypocrite!" But this word
recalls Job to himself. He rises above his pain, scarcely feeling the
twinges. His thought is drawn away from his physical calamity, and
that is a good anodyne for torture. His character is attacked, and he
must run to its succor as he would to the rescue of wife or child. Now
Job ceases sobbing, and becomes attorney for himself. He pleads his
cause with full knowledge of his own heart. He therefore speaks _ex
cathedra_ so far. Job is on the defensive--not against God, but
against men. His "tongue is as the pen of a ready writer." Job is
himself again. His perturbation is passed as a cloud swims across the
sky.

Job is the misjudged man, than which few things are harder to bear.
That enemies misconstrue your motives and misjudge your conduct is to
be expected, though even then the spirit is lacerated; but when friends
misjudge us, our pain seems more than we can bear. This was Job's
case. His familiar friends become His accusers, rasping such words,
"How much more abominable and filthy is man which drinketh iniquity
like water!" and Job's cry crosses the centuries and reaches our ears
this day, "Have pity upon me, have pity upon me, O ye my friends; for
the hand of God hath touched me!" Old Lear's cry, "Stay a little,
Cordelia," is no more pitiful than this strong man reaching for a hand
and finding none, and pleading for sympathy, and pleading in vain.

I see him sitting, with his gray beard blowing about him like a puff of
fog; I hear him when his pitiful voice intones its grief as if it were
a chant; I see the pleading in his eyes, and it fills my breast with
heart-break. You who love great delineations of passion, what think
you of our dramatist's vision of Job? You who count King Lear among
the demigods of creative art, what think you of this Lear's older
brother? His nature is so deep we can not fling plummet to its bottom.
Lear was weak and wrong; but Job, with all his grief upon him, like a
cloud upon a mountain's crest--Job has violated no propriety of man or
God, so far as we have seen, and his cry fills the desert on whose
verge he sits, and clamors like the winds on stormy, winter nights.

Job, misjudged, has the mercy of conscious integrity. Himself rises to
his own vindication, a course just and compatible with sincerity and
modesty. You will