logic so long as
his emotions remained untouched; but there were moments when his blood
seemed to catch fire, and he broke away from the calm reasoning which
serves for placid men. He then spoke with poetry, and with an accent
which affected the nerves of all who heard him. On this afternoon he
began with a little sketch of the history of Job, and he then detailed
his notion that the Arab, who wrote the most wonderful book in the
world, was really the type of the modern man, and lived hundreds of
generations before his time. He pointed out that all around us in
Britain were men of deep thoughts, and wise thoughts, who had grown
discontented with the world, and had set up their own intelligence in an
endeavour to grasp the purpose of an intelligence infinitely higher. The
existence of evil, the existence of pain, the existence of all the
things that make men's pilgrimage, from dark to dark, mysterious and
awful, can never be probed to any purpose by one creature created by the
great Power who also created the mystery of pain and the problem of
evil. Dwelling in the desert, and seeing day by day the movements of the
world, and the strange progress of the stars, Job had grown to cherish
the pride of intellect. So long as his prosperity was unbroken, he was
contented, and busied himself day after day in relieving the wants of
the poor and in succouring the oppressed. But when the blast of
affliction blew upon him, his kindly disposition forsook him for a
little, and he only thought of his own bitterness; he only thought of
the puzzles that have faced every man who has a heart to feel since
first our race appeared in this wondrous place. Musgrave thought that
every man who has faith, every man whose heart has been torn by the
wrenches of chance, must sympathize with the yearning of Job; but at the
last every man, like Job, comes to see that there are things beyond our
minds. Each of us learns that there are things before which our
intelligence must be abashed, and that the only safe rule of life is to
fall into the attitude of trust, and question no more. He felt it
necessary to touch his homely hearers, and he said: "Only last week the
wind woke from the sky, and the storm swept over the moor, and swept
over this little place where two or three are now gathered together to
worship. Many of our friends put forth in the morning in the joy of
strength, in the pride of manhood, and no one of them fancied the sea
that now fawns