the
secret which has been revealed to the reader is not, after
all, revealed to Job or to his friends, and for this plain
reason: the burden of the drama is not that we do, but
that we do not, and cannot, know the mystery of the
government of the world, that it is not for man to seek
it, or for God to reveal it. We, the readers, are, in this
one instance, admitted behind the scenes--for once, in
this single case because it was necessary to meet the
received theory by a positive fact, which contradicted it.
But the explanation of one case need not be the explanation
of another; our business is to do what we know
to be right, and ask no questions. The veil which in the
Egyptian legend lay before the face of Isis, is not to be
raised; and we are not to seek to penetrate secrets
which are not ours.
____

+ The speech of Elihu, which lies between Job's last words and
God's appearance, is now decisively pronounced by Hebrew scholars
not to be genuine. The most superficial reader will have been
perplexed by the introduction of a speaker to whom no allusion is
made, either in the prologue or the epilogue; by a long dissertation,
which adds nothing to the progress of the argument; proceeding
evidently on the false hypothesis of the three friends, and
betraying not the faintest conception of the real cause of Job's
suffering. And the suspicions which such an anomaly would naturally
suggest are now made certainties, by a fuller knowledge of the
language, and the detection of a different hand. The interpolator
has unconsciously confessed the feeling which allowed him to take
so great a liberty. He, too, possessed with the old Jew theory, was
unable to accept in its fulness so great a contradiction to it; and,
missing the spirit of the poem, he believed that God's honour could
still be vindicated in the old way. "His wrath was kindled" against
the friends, because they could not answer Job; and against Job
because he would not be answered; and conceiving himself "full
of matter," and "ready to burst like new bottles," he could not
contain himself, and delivered into the text a sermon on the Theodice,
such, we suppose, as formed the current doctrine of the time in
which he lived.
____

While, however, God does not condescend to justify
His ways to man, He gives judgment on the past
controversy. The self-constituted pleaders for Him, the
acceptors of His person, were all wrong; and Job, the
passionate, vehement, scornful, mis