s wisdom, and to depart from evil, that is understanding."
____

* An allusion, perhaps, to the old bird auguries. The birds, as the
inhabitants of the air, were supposed to be the messengers between
heaven and earth.
____

Here, therefore, it might seem as if all was over.
There is no clearer or purer faith possible for man; and
Job had achieved it. His evil had turned to good;
and sorrow had severed for him the last links which
bound him to lower things. He had felt that he could
do without happiness, that it was no longer essential,
and that he could live on, and still love God, and cling
to Him. But he is not described as of preternatural, or
at all Titanic nature, but as very man, full of all human
tenderness and susceptibility. His old life was still
beautiful to him. He does not hate it, because he can
renounce it; and now that the struggle is over, the
battle fought and won, and his heart has flowed over in
that magnificent song of victory, the note once more
changes: he turns back to earth, to linger over those
old departed days, with which the present is so hard a
contrast; and his parable dies away in a strain of
plaintive, but resigned melancholy. Once more he
throws himself on God, no longer in passionate
expostulation, but in pleading humility.+ And then comes
(perhaps, as Ewald says, it could not have come before)
the answer out of the whirlwind. Job had called on
Him had prayed that He might appear, that he might
plead his cause with Him; and now He comes, and
what will Job do? He comes not as the healing
spirit in the heart of man; but, as Job had at first
demanded, the outward God, the Almighty Creator of
the universe, and clad in the terrors and the glory of it.
Job, in his first precipitancy, had desired to reason with
Him on His government. The poet, in gleaming lines,
describes for an answer the universe as it then was
known, the majesty and awfulness of it; and then asks
whether it is this which he requires to have explained to
him, or which he believes himself capable of conducting.
The revelation acts on Job as the sign of the Macrocosmos
on the modern Faust; but when he sinks
crushed, it is not as the rebellious upstart, struck down
in his pride--for he had himself, partially at least,
subdued his own presumption--but as a humble penitent,
struggling to overcome his weakness. He abhors
himself for his murmurs, and "repents in dust and
ashes." It will have occurred to every one that