condemneth thee, and thine own lips testify against thee.
What is man that he should be clean, and he that is
born of a woman that he should be righteous? Behold,
he putteth no trust in his saints. Yea, the heavens are
not clean in his sight; how much more abominable
and filthy is man, which drinketh iniquity like water?"
Strange, that after all these thousands of years, we
should still persist in this degrading confession, as a
thing which it is impious to deny, and impious to
attempt to render otherwise, when scripture itself, in
language so emphatic, declares that it is a lie. Job is
innocent, perfect, righteous. God Himself bears witness
to it. It is Job who is found at last to have spoken
truth, and the friends to have sinned in denying it.
And he holds fast by his innocency, and with a generous
confidence puts away the misgivings which had begun
to cling to him. Among his complainings he had
exclaimed, that God was remembering upon him the
sins of his youth--not denying them--knowing well,
that he, like others, had gone astray before he had
learnt to control himself, but feeling that at least in an
earthly father it is unjust to visit the faults of childhood
on the matured man; feeling that he had long, long
shaken them off from him, and they did not even
impair the probity of his after life. But now these
doubts, too, pass away in the brave certainty that God
is not less just than man. As the denouncings grow
louder and darker, he appeals from his narrow judges to
the Supreme Tribunal, calls on God to hear him and to
try his cause--and, then, in the strength of this appeal
his eye grows clearer still. His sickness is mortal: he
has no hope in life, and death is near, but the intense
feeling that justice must and will be done, holds to him
closer and closer. God may appear on earth for him;
or if that be too bold a hope, and death finds him as he
is--what is death, then? God will clear his memory
in the place where he lived; his injuries will be righted
over his grave; while for himself, like a sudden gleam of
sunlight between clouds, a clear, bright hope beams up,
that he too, then, in another life, if not in this, when his
skin is wasted off his bones, and the worms have done
their work on the prison of his spirit, he, too, at last
may then see God; may see Him, and have his pleadings heard.

With such a hope, or even the shadow of one, he
turns back to the world again to look at it. Facts
against which