r future glories in connection with the advent of the promised
Messiah. The Hebrew harp--whoever sweeps it, and whether its strains be
jubilant or sad, didactic or emotional, is ever consecrated to God and
the cause of righteousness.

(B.) THE SEVERAL POETICAL BOOKS.

I. JOB.

5. The design of the book of Job will best appear if we first take a
brief survey of its plan. Job, a man eminent above all others for his
piety and uprightness, is accused by Satan as serving God from mercenary
motives. To show the falsehood of this charge, God permits Satan to take
from the patriarch his property and his children, and afterwards to
smite him with a loathsome and distressing disease. Thus stripped of
every thing that could make life valuable, he still holds fast his
integrity, and returns to his wife, who counsels him to "curse God and
die," the discreet and pious answer: "Shall we receive good at the hand
of the Lord, and shall we not receive evil?" His three friends, who have
come to comfort him, amazed and confounded at the greatness of his
calamities, sit down with him in silence for seven days. At last Job
opens his mouth with vehement expressions of grief and impatience, and
curses the day of his birth. The three friends sharply rebuke him, and
in a threefold round of addresses (only that the third time Zophar fails
to speak), enter into an earnest controversy with him assuming the false
ground that the administration of God's government over this world is
strictly _retributive_, so that special calamity comes only as a
punishment for special wickedness, and is therefore itself a proof of
such wickedness. They accordingly exhort him to repent of his sins, and
seek God's forgiveness, as the sure means of removing his present
misfortunes. Conscious of his integrity, Job, with much warmth and
asperity, repels their unjust charges, and refutes their false arguments
by an appeal to facts. The ground he takes is that, by some inscrutable
plan of God, calamity comes alike upon good and bad men. He passionately
beseeches God to show him why he thus deals with him; and, according as
faith or despondency prevails in his soul, he sometimes expresses the
hope that he shall come out of his troubles like gold tried in the fire;
and then, again, the fear that he shall speedily sink down to the grave
under the weight of his sorrows, and nevermore see good. Having put to
silence his three friends by an array of facts to which they can m