rsonal, indirect, the rule of the world, the order of
Providence. He does not accuse Job, but he describes
his calamities, and leaves him to gather for himself the
occasion which had produced them, and then passes
off, as if further to soften the blow, to the mysterious
vision in which the infirmity of mortal nature had been
revealed to him, the universal weakness which involved
both the certainty that Job had shared in it, and the
excuse for him, if he would confess and humble himself:
the blessed virtue of repentance follows, and the
promise that all shall be well.

This is the note on which each of the friends strikes
successively, in the first of the three divisions into
which the dialogue divides itself, but each with
increasing peremptoriness and confidence, as Job, so far from
accepting their interpretation of what had befallen him,
hurls it from him in anger and disdain. Let us observe
(what the Calvinists make of it they have given us no
means of knowing,) he will hear as little of the charges
against mankind, as of charges against himself. He will
not listen to the "corruption of humanity," because in
the consciousness of his own innocency, he knows that
it is not corrupt: he knows it, and we know it, the
divine sentence upon him having been already passed.
He will not acknowledge his sin, he cannot repent, for
he knows not of what to repent. If he could have
reflected calmly, he might have foreseen what they
would say. He knew all that as well as they: it was
the old story which he had learnt, and could repeat, if
necessary, as well as any one: and if it had been no
more than a philosophical discussion, touching himself
no more nearly than it touched his friends, he might
have allowed for the tenacity of opinion in such matters,
and listened to it and replied to it with equanimity.
But as the proverb says, "it is ill-talking between a full
man and a fasting:" and in him such equanimity would
have been but Stoicism or the affectation of it, and
unreal as the others' theories. Possessed with the
certainty that he had not deserved what had befallen
him, harassed with doubt, and worn out with pain and
unkindness, he had assumed (and how natural that he
should assume it), that those who loved him would not
have been hasty to believe evil of him, that he had
been safe in speaking to them as he really felt, and that
he might look to them for something warmer and more
sympathizing than such dreary eloquence.