ary stump which the lightning has scathed,
rotting away in the wind and the rain? Happy! if
happiness be indeed what we men are sent into this
world to seek for, those hitherto thought the noblest
among us were the pitifullest and wretchedest. Surely
it was no error in Job. It was that real insight which
once was given to all the world in Christianity;
however we have forgotten it now. He was learning to
see that it was not in the possession of enjoyment,
no, nor of happiness itself, that the difference lies
between the good and the bad. True, it might be
that God sometimes, even generally, gives such happiness
in, gives it as what Aristotle calls an epigignomenon
telos, but it is no part of the terms on which He admits
us to His service, still less is it the end which we may
propose to ourselves on entering His service. Happiness
He gives to whom He will, or leaves to the angel
of nature to distribute among those who fulfil the laws
upon which it depends. But to serve God and to
love Him is higher and better than happiness, though
it be with wounded feet, and bleeding brow, and hearts
loaded with sorrow. Into this high faith Job is rising,
treading his temptations under his feet, and finding
in them a ladder on which his spirit rises. Thus he
is passing further and ever further from his friends,
soaring where their imaginations cannot follow him.
To them he is a blasphemer whom they gaze at with
awe and terror. They had charged him with sinning,
on the strength of their hypothesis, and he has answered
with a deliberate denial of it. Losing now all mastery
over themselves, they pour out a torrent of mere
extravagant invective and baseless falsehoods, which
in the calmer outset they would have blushed to think
of. They know no evil of Job, but they do not hesitate
now to convert conjecture into certainty, and specify
in detail the particular crimes which he must have
committed. He ought to have committed them, and
so he had; the old argument then as now.--"Is not
thy wickedness great?" says Eliphaz. "Thou hast
taken a pledge from thy brother for nought, and
stripped the naked of their clothing; thou hast not
given water to the weary, and thou hast withholden
bread from the hungry;" and so on through a series
of mere distracted lies. But the time was past when
words like these could make Job angry. Bildad follows
them up with an attempt to frighten him by a picture
of the power of that God whom he was blaspheming