but the scenes, the names, and the incidents, are all contrived as if to baffle curiosity--as if, in the very form of the poem, to teach us that it is no story of a single thing which happened once, but that it belongs to humanity itself, and is the drama of the trial of man, with Almighty G.o.d and the angels as the spectators of it.
No reader can have failed to have been struck with the simplicity of the opening. Still, calm, and most majestic, it tells us everything which is necessary to be known in the fewest possible words. The history of Job was probably a tradition in the East; his name, like that of Priam in Greece, the symbol of fallen greatness, and his misfortunes the problem of philosophers. In keeping with the current belief, he is described as a model of excellence, the most perfect and upright man upon the earth, "and the same was the greatest man in all the east." So far, greatness and goodness had gone hand in hand together, as the popular theory required. The details of his character are brought out in the progress of the poem. He was "the father of the oppressed, and of those who had none to help them." When he sat as a judge in the market-places, "righteousness clothed him" there, and "his justice was a robe and a diadem." He "broke the jaws of the wicked, and plucked the spoil out of his teeth;" and, humble in the midst of his power, he "did not despise the cause of his manservant, or his maidservant, when they contended with him," knowing (and amidst those old people where the mult.i.tude of mankind were regarded as the born slaves of the powerful, to be carved into eunuchs or polluted into concubines at their master"s pleasure, it was no easy matter to know it)--knowing that "He who had made him had made them," and _one_ "had fashioned them both in the womb." Above all, he was the friend of the poor; "the blessing of him that was ready to perish came upon him," and he "made the widow"s heart to sing for joy."
Setting these characteristics of his daily life by the side of his unaffected piety, as it is described in the first chapter, we have a picture of the best man who could then be conceived; not a hard ascetic, living in haughty or cowardly isolation, but a warm figure of flesh and blood, a man full of all human loveliness, and to whom, that no room might be left for any possible Calvinistic falsehood, G.o.d Himself bears the emphatic testimony, that "there was none like him upon the earth, a perfect and upright man, who feared G.o.d and eschewed evil." If such a person as this, therefore, could be made miserable, necessarily the current belief of the Jews was false to the root; and tradition furnished the fact that he had been visited by every worst calamity. How was it then to be accounted for? Out of a thousand possible explanations, the poet introduces a single one. He admits us behind the veil which covers the ways of Providence, and we hear the accusing angel charging Job with an interested piety, and of being obedient because it was his policy. "Job does not serve G.o.d for nought," he says; "strip him of his splendour, and see if he will care for G.o.d then. Humble him into poverty and wretchedness, so only we shall know what is in his heart."
The cause thus introduced is itself a rebuke to the belief which, with its "rewards and punishments," immediately fostered selfishness; and the poem opens with a double action, on one side to try the question whether it is possible for man to love G.o.d disinterestedly--the issue of which trial is not foreseen or even foretold, and we watch the progress of it with an anxious and fearful interest; on the other side, to bring out, in contrast to the truth which we already know, the cruel falsehood of the popular faith--to show how, instead of leading men to mercy and affection, it hardens their heart, narrows their sympathies, and enhances the trials of the sufferer, by refinements which even Satan had not antic.i.p.ated. The combination of evils, as blow falls on blow, suddenly, swiftly, and terribly, has all the appearance of a purposed visitation (as indeed it was); if ever outward incidents might with justice be interpreted as the immediate action of Providence, those which fell on Job might be so interpreted. The world turns disdainfully from the fallen in the world"s way; but far worse than this, his chosen friends, wise, good, pious men, as wisdom and piety were then, without one glimpse of the true cause of his sufferings, see in them a judgment upon his secret sins. He becomes to them an ill.u.s.tration, and even (such are the paralogisms of men of this description) a proof of their theory that "the prosperity of the wicked is but for a while;" and instead of the comfort and help which they might have brought him, and which in the end they were made to bring him, he is to them no more than a text for the enunciation of solemn falsehood. And even worse again, the sufferer himself had been educated in the same creed; he, too, had been taught to see the hand of G.o.d in the outward dispensation; and feeling from the bottom of his heart, that he, in his own case, was a sure contradiction of what he had learnt to believe, he himself finds his very faith in G.o.d shaken from its foundation. The worst evils which Satan had devised were distanced far by those which had been created by human folly.
The creed in which Job had believed was tried and found wanting, and, as it ever will be when the facts of experience come in contact with the inadequate formula, the true is found so mingled with the false, that they can hardly be disentangled, and are in danger of being swept away together.
A studied respect is shown, however, to orthodoxy, even while it is arraigned for judgment. It may be doubtful whether the writer purposely intended it. He probably cared only to tell the real truth; to say for the old theory the best which could be said, and to produce as its defenders the best and wisest men whom in his experience he had known to believe and defend it. At any rate, he represents the three friends, not as a weaker person would have represented them, as foolish, obstinate bigots, but as wise, humane, and almost great men, who, at the outset, at least, are animated only by the kindest feelings, and speak what they have to say with the most earnest conviction that it is true. Job is vehement, desperate, reckless. His language is the wild, natural outpouring of suffering. The friends, true to the eternal nature of man, are grave, solemn, and indignant, preaching their half truth, and mistaken only in supposing that it is the whole; speaking, as all such persons would speak and still do speak, in defending what they consider sacred truth against the a.s.saults of folly and scepticism. How beautiful is their first introduction:--
"Now when Job"s three friends heard of all this evil which was come upon him, they came every one from his own place; Eliphaz the Temanite, and Bildad the Shuhite, and Zophar the Naamathite: for they had made an appointment together to come to mourn with him and to comfort him. And when they lifted up their eyes afar off, and knew him not, they lifted up their voice and wept, and they rent every one his mantle, and sprinkled dust upon their heads towards heaven. So they sat down with him upon the ground seven days and seven nights, and none spake a word unto him, for they saw that his grief was very great."
What a picture is there! What majestic tenderness! His wife had scoffed at his faith, bidding him "leave G.o.d and die." "His acquaintance had turned from him." He "had called his servant, and he had given him no answer." Even the children, in their unconscious cruelty, had gathered round and mocked him as he lay among the ashes. But "his friends sprinkle dust towards heaven, and sit silently by him, and weep for him seven days and seven nights upon the ground." That is, they were true-hearted, truly loving, devout, religious men; and yet they, with their religion, were to become the instruments of the most poignant sufferings, the sharpest temptations, which he had to endure. So it was, and is, and will be--of such materials is this human life of ours composed.
And now, remembering the double action of the drama--the actual trial of Job, the result of which is uncertain; and the delusion of these men, which is, at the outset, certain--let us go rapidly through the dialogue. Satan"s share in the temptation had already been overcome.
Lying sick in the loathsome disease which had been sent upon him, his wife, in Satan"s own words, had tempted Job to say, "Farewell to G.o.d,"--think no more of G.o.d or goodness, since this was all which came of it; and Job had told her that she spoke as one of the foolish women.
He "had received good at the hand of the Lord, and should he not receive evil?" But now, when real love and real affection appear, his heart melts in him; he loses his forced self-composure, and bursts into a pa.s.sionate regret that he had ever been born. In the agony of his sufferings, hope of better things had died away. He does not complain of injustice; as yet, and before his friends have stung and wounded him, he makes no questioning of Providence,--but why was life given to him at all, if only for this? Sick in mind, and sick in body, but one wish remains to him, that death will come quickly and end all. It is a cry from the very depths of a single and simple heart. But for such simplicity and singleness his friends could not give him credit; possessed beforehand with their idea, they see in his misery only a fatal witness against him; such calamities could not have befallen a man, the justice of G.o.d would not have permitted it, unless they had been deserved. Job had sinned and he had suffered, and this wild pa.s.sion was but impenitence and rebellion.
Being as certain that they were right in this opinion as they were that G.o.d Himself existed, that they should speak what they felt was only natural and necessary; and their language at the outset is, all which would be dictated by the tenderest sympathy. Eliphaz opens, the oldest and most important of the three, in a soft, subdued, suggestive strain, contriving in every way to spare the feelings of the sufferer, to the extreme to which his love will allow him. All is general, impersonal, indirect,--the rule of the world, the order of Providence. He does not accuse Job, but he describes his calamities, and leaves him to gather for himself the occasion which had produced them; and then pa.s.ses off, as if further to soften the blow, to the mysterious vision in which the infirmity of mortal nature had been revealed to him, the universal weakness which involved both the certainty that Job had shared in it, and the excuse for him, if he would confess and humble himself: the blessed virtue of repentance follows, and the promise that all shall be well.
This is the note on which each of the friends strikes successively, in the first of the three divisions into which the dialogue divides itself, but each with increasing peremptoriness and confidence, as Job, so far from accepting their interpretation of what had befallen him, hurls it from him in anger and disdain. Let us observe (and the Calvinists should consider this), he will hear as little of the charges against mankind as of charges against himself. He will not listen to the "corruption of humanity," because in the consciousness of his own innocency, he knows that it is not corrupt: he knows that he is himself just and good, and we know it, the Divine sentence upon him having been already pa.s.sed. He will not acknowledge his sin, for he knows not of what to repent. If he could have reflected calmly, he might have foreseen what they would say.
He knew all that as well as they: it was the old story which he had learnt, and could repeat, if necessary, as well as anyone: and if it had been no more than a philosophical discussion, touching himself no more nearly than it touched his friends, he might have allowed for the tenacity of opinion in such matters, and listened to it and replied to it with equanimity. But, as the proverb says, "It is ill talking between a full man and a fasting:" and in Job such equanimity would have been but Stoicism, or the affectation of it, and unreal as the others"
theories. Possessed with the certainty that he had not deserved what had befallen him, hara.s.sed with doubt, and worn out with pain and unkindness, he had a.s.sumed (and how natural that he should a.s.sume it) that those who loved him should not have been hasty to believe evil of him; he had spoken to them as he really felt, and he thought that he might have looked to them for something warmer and more sympathising than such dreary eloquence. So when the revelation comes upon him of what was pa.s.sing in them, he attributes it (and now he is unjust to them) to a falsehood of heart, and not to a blindness of understanding.
Their sermons, so kindly intended, roll past him as a dismal mockery.
They had been shocked (and how true again is this to nature) at his pa.s.sionate cry for death. "Do ye reprove words?" he says, "and the speeches of one that is desperate, which are as wind?" It was but poor friendship and narrow wisdom. He had looked to them for pity, for comfort, and love. He had longed for it as the parched caravans in the desert for the water-streams, and "his brethren had dealt deceitfully with him." The brooks, in the cool winter, roll in a full turbid torrent; "what time it waxes warm they vanish, when it is hot they are consumed out of their place; the caravans of Tema looked for them, the companies of Sheba waited for them; they were confounded because they had hoped; they came thither, and there was nothing." If for once these poor men could have trusted their hearts, if for once they could have believed that there might be "more things in heaven and earth" than were dreamt of in their philosophy--but this is the one thing which they could not do, which the theologian proper never has done or will do. And thus whatever of calmness or endurance Job alone, on his ash-heap, might have conquered for himself, is all scattered away; and as the strong gusts of pa.s.sion sweep to and fro across his heart, he pours himself out in wild fitful music, so beautiful because so true, not answering them or their speeches, but now flinging them from him in scorn, now appealing to their mercy, or turning indignantly to G.o.d; now praying for death; now in perplexity doubting whether, in some mystic way which he cannot understand, he may not, perhaps, after all, really have sinned, and praying to be shown his fault; and then staggering further into the darkness, and breaking out into upbraidings of the Power which has become so dreadful an enigma to him. "Thou enquirest after my iniquity, thou searchest after my sin, and thou knowest that I am not wicked. Why didst thou bring me forth out of the womb? Oh, that I had given up the ghost, and no eye had seen me. Cease, let me alone. It is but a little while that I have to live. Let me alone, that I may take comfort a little before I go, whence I shall not return to the land of darkness and the shadow of death." In what other poem in the world is there pathos deep as this? With experience so stern as his, it was not for Job to be calm, and self-possessed, and delicate in his words. He speaks not what he knows, but what he feels; and without fear the writer allows him to throw out his pa.s.sion all genuine as it rises, not overmuch caring how nice ears might be offended, but contented to be true to the real emotion of a genuine human heart. So the poem runs on to the end of the first answer to Zophar.
But now, with admirable fitness, as the contest goes forward, the relative position of the speakers begins to change. Hitherto, Job only had been pa.s.sionate; and his friends temperate and collected. Now, becoming shocked at his obstinacy, and disappointed in the result of their homilies, they stray still further from the truth in an endeavour to strengthen their position, and, as a natural consequence, visibly grow angry. To them, Job"s vehement and desperate speeches are d.a.m.ning evidence of the truth of their suspicion. Impiety is added to his first sin, and they begin to see in him a rebel against G.o.d. At first they had been contented to speak generally, and much which they had urged was partially true; now they step forward to a direct application, and formally and personally accuse himself. Here their ground is positively false; and with delicate art it is they who are now growing violent, and wounded self-love begins to show behind their zeal for G.o.d; while in contrast to them, as there is less and less truth in what they say, Job grows more and more collected. For a time it had seemed doubtful how he would endure his trial. The light of his faith was burning feebly and unsteadily; a little more, and it seemed as if it might have utterly gone out. But at last the storm was lulling; as the charges are brought personally home to him, the confidence in his own real innocence rises against them. He had before known that he was innocent; now he feels the strength which lies in innocence, as if G.o.d were beginning to reveal Himself within him, to prepare the way for the after outward manifestation of Himself.
The friends, as before, repeat one another with but little difference; the sameness being of course intentional, as showing that they were not speaking for themselves, but as representatives of a prevailing opinion.
Eliphaz, again, gives the note which the others follow. Hear this Calvinist of the old world: "Thy own mouth 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. G.o.d 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 thrusts away the misgivings which had begun to cling to him. Among his complainings he had exclaimed, that G.o.d 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, pa.s.s away in the brave certainty that G.o.d 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 G.o.d to hear him and to try his cause--and then, in the strength of this appeal the mist rises from before his eyes. 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. G.o.d 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? G.o.d 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 G.o.d; 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 he had before closed his eyes he allows and confronts, and he sees that his own little experience is but the reflection of a law. You tell me, he seems to say, that the good are rewarded, and that the wicked are punished; that G.o.d is just, and that this is always so. Perhaps it is, or will be, but not in the way which you imagine. You have known me, you have known what my life has been; you see what I am, and it is no difficulty to you. You prefer believing that I, whom you call your friend, am a deceiver or a pretender, to admitting the possibility of the falsehood of your hypothesis. You will not listen to my a.s.surance, and you are angry with me because I will not lie against my own soul, and acknowledge sins which I have not committed. You appeal to the course of the world in proof of your faith, and challenge me to answer you. Well, then, I accept your challenge. The world is not what you say. You have told me what you have seen of it: I will tell you what I have seen.
"Even while I remember I am afraid, and trembling taketh hold upon my flesh. Wherefore do the wicked become old, yea, and are mighty in power?
Their seed is established in their sight with them, and their offspring before their eyes. Their houses are safe from fear, neither is the rod of G.o.d upon them. Their bull gendereth and faileth not; their cow calveth, and casteth not her calf. They send forth their little ones like a flock, and their children dance. They take the timbrel and harp, and rejoice at the sound of the organ. They spend their days in wealth, and in a moment go down into the grave. Therefore they say unto G.o.d, Depart from us, for we desire not the knowledge of Thy ways. What is the Almighty that we should serve Him? and what profit should we have if we pray to Him?"
Will you quote the weary proverb? Will you say that "G.o.d layeth up His iniquity for His children?" (Our translators have wholly lost the sense of this pa.s.sage, and endeavour to make Job acknowledge what he is steadfastly denying.) Well, and what then? What will he care? "Will his own eye see his own fall? Will he drink the wrath of the Almighty? What are the fortunes of his house to him if the number of his own months is fulfilled?" One man is good and another wicked, one is happy and another is miserable. In the great indifference of nature they share alike in the common lot. "They lie down alike in the dust, and the worms cover them."
Ewald, and many other critics, suppose that Job was hurried away by his feelings to say all this; and that in his calmer moments he must have felt that it was untrue. It is a point on which we must decline accepting even Ewald"s high authority. Even then, in those old times, it was beginning to be terribly true. Even then the current theory was obliged to bend to large exceptions; and what Job saw as exceptions we see round us everywhere. It was true then, it is infinitely more true now, that what is called virtue in the common sense of the word, still more that n.o.bleness, G.o.dliness, or heroism of character in any form whatsoever, have nothing to do with this or that man"s prosperity, or even happiness. The thoroughly vicious man is no doubt wretched enough; but the worldly, prudent, self-restraining man, with his five senses, which he understands how to gratify with tempered indulgence, with a conscience satisfied with the hack routine of what is called respectability,--such a man feels no wretchedness; no inward uneasiness disturbs him, no desires which he cannot gratify; and this though he be the basest and most contemptible slave of his own selfishness.
Providence will not interfere to punish him. Let him obey the laws under which prosperity is obtainable, and he will obtain it, let him never fear. He will obtain it, be he base or n.o.ble. Nature is indifferent; the famine and the earthquake, and the blight or the accident, will not discriminate to strike him. He may insure himself against casualties in these days of ours, with the money perhaps which a better man would have given away, and he will have his reward. He need not doubt it.
And, again, it is not true, as optimists would persuade us, that such prosperity brings no real pleasure. A man with no high aspirations, who thrives, and makes money, and envelops himself in comforts, is as happy as such a nature can be. If unbroken satisfaction be the most blessed state for a man (and this certainly is the practical notion of happiness), he is the happiest of men. Nor are those idle phrases any truer, that the good man"s goodness is a never-ceasing sunshine; that virtue is its own reward, &c. &c. If men truly virtuous care to be rewarded for it, their virtue is but a poor investment of their moral capital. Was Job so happy then on that ash-heap of his, the mark of the world"s scorn, and the b.u.t.t for the spiritual archery of the theologian, alone in his forlorn nakedness, like some old dreary stump which the lightning has scathed, rotting away in the wind and the rain? If happiness be indeed what we men are sent into this world to seek for, those hitherto thought the n.o.blest 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. Job 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 G.o.d sometimes, even generally, gives such happiness--gives it in what Aristotle calls an [Greek: 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 G.o.d and to love Him is higher and better than happiness, though it be with wounded feet, and bleeding brows, 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 pa.s.sing further and even 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 falsehood, which in the calmer outset they would have blushed to think of. They _know_ no evil of Job, but they do not hesitate 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 G.o.d whom he was blaspheming; but Job cuts short his harangue, and ends it for him in a spirit of loftiness which Bildad could not have approached; and then proudly and calmly rebukes them all, no longer in scorn and irony, but in high, tranquil self-possession. "G.o.d forbid that I should justify you," he says; "till I die I will not remove my integrity from me. My righteousness I hold fast, and will not let it go. My heart shall not reproach me so long as I live."
So far all has been clear, each party, with increasing confidence, having insisted on their own position, and denounced their adversaries.
A difficulty now arises which, at first sight, appears insurmountable.
As the chapters are at present printed, the entire of the twenty-seventh is a.s.signed to Job, and the paragraph from the eleventh to the twenty-third verses is in direct contradiction to all which he has maintained before--is, in fact, a concession of having been wrong from the beginning. Ewald, who, as we said above, himself refuses to allow the truth of Job"s last and highest position, supposes that he is here receding from it, and confessing what an over-precipitate pa.s.sion had betrayed him into denying. For many reasons, princ.i.p.ally because we are satisfied that Job said then no more than the real fact, we cannot think Ewald right; and the concessions are too large and too inconsistent to be reconciled even with his own general theory of the poem. Another solution of the difficulty is very simple, although it is to be admitted that it rather cuts the knot than unties it. Eliphaz and Bildad have each spoken a third time; the symmetry of the general form requires that now Zophar should speak; and the suggestion, we believe, was first made by Dr. Kennicott, that he did speak, and that the verses in question belong to him. Any one who is accustomed to MSS. will understand easily how such a mistake, if it be one, might have arisen. Even in Shakespeare, the speeches in the early editions are in many instances wrongly divided, and a.s.signed to the wrong persons. It might have arisen from inadvertence; it might have arisen from the foolishness of some Jewish transcriber, who resolved, at all costs, to drag the book into harmony with Judaism, and make Job unsay his heresy. This view has the merit of fully clearing up the obscurity. Another, however, has been suggested by Eichorn, who originally followed Kennicott, but discovered, as he supposed, a less violent hypothesis, which was equally satisfactory. Eichorn imagines the verses to be a summary by Job of his adversaries" opinions, as if he said--"Listen now; you know what the facts are as well as I, and yet you maintain this;" and then pa.s.sed on with his indirect reply to it. It is possible that Eichorn may be right--at any rate, either he is right, or else Dr. Kennicott is.
Certainly, Ewald is not. Taken as an account of Job"s own conviction, the pa.s.sage contradicts the burden of the whole poem. Pa.s.sing it by, therefore, and going to what immediately follows, we arrive at what, in a human sense, is the final climax--Job"s victory and triumph. He had appealed to G.o.d, and G.o.d had not appeared; he had doubted and fought against his doubts, and at last had crushed them down. He, too, had been taught to look for G.o.d in outward judgments; and when his own experience had shown him his mistake, he knew not where to turn. He had been leaning on a bruised reed, and it had run into his hand and pierced him.
But as soon as in the speeches of his friend he saw it all laid down in its weakness and its false conclusions--when he saw the defenders of it wandering further and further from what he knew to be true, growing every moment, as if from a consciousness of the unsoundness of their standing ground, more violent, obstinate, and unreasonable, the scales fell more and more from his eyes--he had seen the fact that the wicked might prosper, and in learning to depend upon his innocency he had felt that the good man"s support was there, if it was anywhere; and at last, with all his heart, was reconciled to the truth. The mystery of the outer world becomes deeper to him, but he does not any more try to understand it. The wisdom which can compa.s.s that mystery, he knows, is not in man, though man search for it deeper and harder than the miner searches for the hidden treasures of the earth; the wisdom which alone is attainable is resignation to G.o.d.
"Where," he cries, "shall wisdom be found, and where is the place of understanding? Man knoweth not the price thereof, neither is it found in the land of the living. The depth said it is not with me; and the sea said it is not in me. It is hid from the eyes of all living, and kept close from the fowls of the air.[K] G.o.d understandeth the way thereof, and He knoweth the place thereof [He, not man, understands the mysteries of the world which He has made]. And unto man He said, Behold! the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom; and to depart from evil, that is understanding."
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 G.o.d, and cling to Him. But he is not described as of preternatural, or at all t.i.tanic 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 G.o.d, no longer in pa.s.sionate expostulation, but in pleading humility.[L]
And then comes (perhaps, as Ewald says, it _could not_ have come before) the answer out of the whirlwind. Job had called on G.o.d, and 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 G.o.d, 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 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 G.o.d 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 aegyptian 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.
While, however, G.o.d does not condescend to justify his ways to man, he gives judgment on the past controversy. The self-const.i.tuted pleaders for him, the acceptors of his person, were all wrong; and Job--the pa.s.sionate, vehement, scornful, misbelieving Job--he had spoken the truth; he at least had spoken facts, and they had been defending a transient theory as an everlasting truth.
"And it was so, that after the Lord had spoken these words to Job, the Lord said to Eliphaz the Temanite, My wrath is kindled against thee and against thy two friends; for ye have not spoken of me the thing that is right, as my servant Job hath. Therefore take unto you now seven bullocks and seven rams, and go to my servant Job; and offer for yourselves a burnt-offering. And my servant Job shall pray for you, and him will I accept. Lest I deal with you after your folly, for that ye have not spoken of me the thing which is right, like my servant Job."
One act of justice remains. Knowing as we do the cause of Job"s misfortunes, and that as soon as his trial was over it was no longer operative, our sense of fitness could not be satisfied unless he were indemnified outwardly for his outward sufferings. Satan is defeated, and Job"s integrity proved; and there is no reason why the general law should be interfered with, which, however large the exceptions, tends to connect goodness and prosperity; or why obvious calamities, obviously undeserved, should remain any more unremoved. Perhaps, too, a deeper lesson still lies below his restoration--something perhaps of this kind.
Prosperity, enjoyment, happiness, comfort, peace, whatever be the name by which we designate that state in which life is to our own selves pleasant and delightful, as long as they are sought or prized as things essential, so far have a tendency to disenn.o.ble our nature, and are a sign that we are still in servitude to selfishness. Only when they lie outside us, as ornaments merely to be worn or laid aside as G.o.d pleases--only then may such things be possessed with impunity. Job"s heart in early times had clung to them more than he knew, but now he was purged clean, and they were restored because he had ceased to need them.
Such in outline is this wonderful poem. With the material of which it is woven we have not here been concerned, although it is so rich and pregnant that we might with little difficulty construct out of it a complete picture of the world as then it was: its life, knowledge, arts, habits, superst.i.tions, hopes, and fears. The subject is the problem of all mankind, and the composition embraces no less wide a range. But what we are here most interested upon is the epoch which it marks in the progress of mankind, as the first recorded struggle of a new experience with an established orthodox belief. True, for hundreds of years, perhaps for a thousand, the superst.i.tion against which it was directed continued. When Christ came it was still in its vitality. Nay, as we saw, it is alive, or in a sort of mock life, among us at this very day.
But even those who retained their imperfect belief had received into their canon a book which treated it with contumely and scorn, so irresistible was the majesty of truth.
In days like these, when we hear so much of progress, it is worth while to ask ourselves what advances we have made further in the same direction? and once more, at the risk of some repet.i.tion, let us look at the position in which this book leaves us. It had been a.s.sumed that man, if he lived a just and upright life, had a right to expect to be happy.
Happiness, "his being"s end and aim," was his legitimate and covenanted reward. If G.o.d therefore was just, such a man would be happy; and inasmuch as G.o.d was just, the man who was not happy had not deserved to be. There is no flaw in this argument; and if it is unsound, the fallacy can only lie in the supposed right to happiness. It is idle to talk of inward consolations. Job felt them, but they were not everything. They did not relieve the anguish of his wounds; they did not make the loss of his children, or his friends" unkindness, any the less painful to him.
The poet, indeed, restores him in the book; but in life it need not have been so. He might have died upon his ash-heap, as thousands of good men have died, and will die again, in misery. Happiness, therefore, is _not_ what we are to look for. Our place is to be true to the best which we know, to seek that and do that; and if by "virtue its own reward" be meant that the good man cares only to continue good, desiring nothing more, then it is a true and n.o.ble saying. But if virtue be valued because it is politic, because in pursuit of it will be found most enjoyment and fewest sufferings, then it is not n.o.ble any more, and it is turning the truth of G.o.d into a lie. Let us do right, and whether happiness come or unhappiness it is no very mighty matter. If it come, life will be sweet; if it do not come, life will be bitter--bitter, not sweet, and yet to be borne. On such a theory alone is the government of this world intelligibly just. The well-being of our souls depends only on what we _are_; and n.o.bleness of character is nothing else but steady love of good and steady scorn of evil. The government of the world is a problem while the desire of selfish enjoyment survives; and when justice is not done according to such standard (which will not be till the day after doomsday, and not then), self-loving men will still ask, why? and find no answer. Only to those who have the heart to say, "We can do without that; it is not what we ask or desire," is there no secret. Man will have what he deserves, and will find what is really best for him, exactly as he honestly seeks for it. Happiness may fly away, pleasure pall or cease to be obtainable, wealth decay, friends fail or prove unkind, and fame turn to infamy; but the power to serve G.o.d never fails, and the love of Him is never rejected.
Most of us, at one time or other of our lives, have known something of love--of that only pure love in which no _self_ is left remaining. We have loved as children, we have loved as lovers; some of us have learnt to love a cause, a faith, a country; and what love would that be which existed only with a prudent view to after-interests. Surely there is a love which exults in the power of self-abandonment, and can glory in the privilege of suffering for what is good. _Que mon nom soit fletri, pourvu que la France soit libre_, said Danton; and those wild patriots who had trampled into scorn the faith in an immortal life in which they would be rewarded for what they were suffering, went to their graves as beds, for the dream of a people"s liberty. Justice is done; the balance is not deranged. It only seems deranged, as long as we have not learnt to serve without looking to be paid for it.
Such is the theory of life which is to be found in the Book of Job; a faith which has flashed up in all times and all lands, wherever high-minded men were to be found, and which pa.s.sed in Christianity into the acknowledged creed of half the world. The cross was the new symbol, the Divine sufferer the great example; and mankind answered to the call, because the appeal was not to what was poor and selfish in them, but to whatever of best and bravest was in their nature. The law of reward and punishment was superseded by the law of love. Thou shalt love G.o.d and thou shalt love man; and that was not love--men knew it once--which was bought by the prospect of reward. Times are changed with us now. Thou shalt love G.o.d and thou shalt love man, in the hands of a Paley, are found to mean no more than, Thou shalt love thyself after an enlightened manner. And the same base tone has saturated not only our common feelings, but our Christian theologies and our Antichristian philosophies. A prudent regard to our future interests; an abstinence from present unlawful pleasures, because they will entail the loss of greater pleasure by-and-by, or perhaps be paid for with pain,--this is called virtue now; and the belief that such beings as men can be influenced by any more elevated feelings, is smiled at as the dream of enthusiasts whose hearts have outrun their understandings. Indeed, he were but a poor lover whose devotion to his mistress lay resting on the feeling that a marriage with her would conduce to his own comforts. That were a poor patriot who served his country for the hire which his country would give to him. And we should think but poorly of a son who thus addressed his earthly father: "Father, on whom my fortunes depend, teach me to do what pleases thee, that I, pleasing thee in all things, may obtain those good things which thou hast promised to give to thy obedient children." If any of us who have lived in so meagre a faith venture, by-and-by, to put in our claims, Satan will be likely to say of us (with better reason than he did of Job), "Did they serve G.o.d for nought, then? Take their reward from them, and they will curse Him to His face." If Christianity had never borne itself more loftily than this, do we suppose that those fierce Nors.e.m.e.n who had learnt, in the fiery war-songs of the Edda, of what stuff the hearts of heroes are composed, would have fashioned their sword-hilts into crosses, and themselves into a crusading chivalry? Let us not dishonour our great fathers with the dream of it. The Christians, like the Stoics and the Epicureans, would have lived their little day among the ign.o.ble sects of an effete civilisation, and would have pa.s.sed off and been heard of no more. It was in another spirit that those first preachers of righteousness went out upon their warfare with evil. They preached, not enlightened prudence, but purity, justice, goodness; holding out no promises in this world except of suffering as their great Master had suffered, and rejoicing that they were counted worthy to suffer for His sake. And that crown of glory which they did believe to await them in a life beyond the grave, was no enjoyment of what they had surrendered in life, was not enjoyment at all in any sense which human thought or language can attach to the words; as little like it as the crown of love is like it, which the true lover looks for when at last he obtains his mistress. It was to be with Christ--to lose themselves in Him.
How these high feelings ebbed away, and Christianity became what we know it, we are partially beginning to see. The living spirit organised for itself a body of perishable flesh: not only the real gains of real experience, but mere conjectural hypotheses, current at the day for the solution of unexplained phenomena, became formulae and articles of faith.
Again, as before, the living and the dead were bound together, and the seeds of decay were already planted on the birth of a constructed polity.
But there was another cause allied to this, and yet different from it, which, though a law of human nature itself, seems nowadays altogether forgotten. In the rapid and steady advance of our knowledge of material things, we are apt to believe that all our knowledge follows the same law; that it is merely generalised experience; that experience acc.u.mulates daily, and, therefore, that "progress of the species," _in all senses_, is an obvious and necessary fact. There is something which is true in this view, mixed with a great deal which is false. Material knowledge, the physical and mechanical sciences, make their way from step to step, from experiment to experiment, and each advance is secured and made good, and cannot again be lost. One generation takes up the general sum of experience where the last laid it down, adds to it what it has the opportunity of adding, and leaves it with interest to the next. The successive positions, as they are gained, require nothing for the apprehension of them but an understanding ordinarily cultivated.
Prejudices have to be encountered, but prejudices of opinion merely, not prejudices of conscience or prejudices of self-love, like those which beset our progress in the science of morality. But in morals we enter upon conditions wholly different--conditions in which age differs from age, man differs from man, and even from himself, at different moments.
We all have experienced times when, as we say, we should not know ourselves; some, when we fall below our average level; some, when we are lifted above, and put on, as it were, a higher nature. At such intervals as these last (unfortunately, with most of us, of rare occurrence), many things become clear to us which before were hard sayings; propositions become alive which, usually, are but dry words; our hearts seem purer, our motives loftier; our purposes, what we are proud to acknowledge to ourselves.
And, as man is unequal to himself, so is man to his neighbour, and period to period. The entire method of action, the theories of human life which in one era prevail universally, to the next are unpractical and insane, as those of this next would have seemed mere baseness to the first, if the first could have antic.i.p.ated them. One epoch, we may suppose, holds some "greatest n.o.bleness principle," the other some "greatest happiness principle;" and then their very systems of axioms will contradict one another; their general conceptions and their detailed interpretations, their rules, judgments, opinions, practices will be in perpetual and endless collision. Our minds take shape from our hearts, and the facts of moral experience do not teach their own meaning, but submit to many readings according to the power of the eye which we bring with us.
The want of a clear perception of so important a feature about us leads to many singular contradictions. A believer in popular Protestantism, who is also a believer in progress, ought, if he were consistent, to regard mankind as growing every day towards a more and more advantageous position with respect to the trials of life; and yet if he were asked whether it was easier for him to "save his soul" in the nineteenth century than it would have been in the first or second, or whether the said soul was necessarily better worth saving, he would be perplexed for an answer. There is hardly one of us who, in childhood, has not felt like the Jews to whom Christ spoke, that if he had "lived in the days of the Fathers," if he had had their advantages, he would have found duty a much easier matter; and some of us in mature life have felt that in old Athens, or old republican Rome, in the first ages of Christianity, in the Crusades or at the Reformation, there was a contagious atmosphere of heroism, in which we should have been less troubled with the little feelings which cling about us now. At any rate, it is at these rare epochs only that real additions are made to our moral knowledge. At such times, new truths are, indeed, sent down among us, and, for periods longer or shorter, may be seen to exercise an elevating influence on mankind. Perhaps what is gained on these occasions is never entirely lost. The historical monuments of their effects are at least indestructible; and when the spirit which gave them birth reappears, their dormant energy awakens again.
But it seems from our present experience of what, in some at least of its modern forms, Christianity has been capable of becoming, that there is no doctrine in itself so pure, but what the meaner nature which is in us can disarm and distort it, and adapt it to its own littleness. The once living spirit dries up into formulae, and formulae, whether of ma.s.s-sacrifice or vicarious righteousness, or "reward and punishment,"
are contrived ever so as to escape making over-high demands upon the conscience. Some aim at dispensing with obedience altogether, and those which insist on obedience rest the obligations of it on the poorest of motives. So things go on till there is no life left at all; till, from all higher aspirations, we are lowered down to the love of self after an enlightened manner; and then nothing remains but to fight the battle over again. The once beneficial truth has become, as in Job"s case, a cruel and mischievous deception, and the whole question of life and its obligations must again be opened.
It is now some three centuries since the last of such reopenings. If we ask ourselves how much during this time has been actually added to the sum of our knowledge in these matters; what, in all the thousands upon thousands of sermons, and theologies, and philosophies with which Europe has been deluged, has been gained for mankind beyond what we have found in this Book of Job, how far all this has advanced us in the "progress of humanity," it were hard, or rather it is easy, to answer. How far we have fallen below, let Paley and the rest bear witness. But what moral question can be asked which admits now of a grander solution than was offered two, perhaps three, thousand years ago? The world has not been standing still; experience of man and life has increased; questions have multiplied on questions, while the answers of the established teachers to them have been growing every day more and more incredible. What other answers have there been? Of all the countless books which have appeared, there has been only one of enduring importance, in which an attempt is made to carry on the solution of the great problem. Job is given over into Satan"s hand to be tempted; and though he shakes, he does not fall.
Taking the temptation of Job for his model, Goethe has similarly exposed his Faust to trial, and with him the tempter succeeds. His hero falls from sin to sin, from crime to crime; he becomes a seducer, a murderer, a betrayer, following recklessly his evil angel wherever he chooses to lead him; and yet, with all this, he never wholly forfeits our sympathy. In spite of his weakness, his heart is still true to his higher nature; sick and restless, even in the delirium of enjoyment he always longs for something better, and he never can be brought to say of evil that it is good. And therefore, after all, the devil is balked of his prey; in virtue of this one fact, that the evil in which he steeped himself remained to the last hateful to him, Faust is saved by the angels.... It will be eagerly answered for the established belief, that such cases are its especial province. All men are sinners, and _it_ possesses the blessed remedy for sin. But, among the countless numbers of those characters so strangely mixed among us, in which the dark and the bright fibres cross like a meshwork; characters at one moment capable of acts of heroic greatness, at another hurried by temptation into actions which even common men may deplore, how many are there who have never availed themselves of the conditions of reconciliation as orthodoxy proffers them, and of such men what is to be said? It was said once of a sinner that to her "much was forgiven, for she loved much."
But this is language which theology has as little appropriated as the Jews could appropriate the language of Job. It cannot recognise the power of the human heart. It has no balance in which to weigh the good against the evil; and when a great Burns or a Mirabeau comes before it, it can but tremblingly count up the offences committed, and then, looking to the end, and finding its own terms not to have been complied with, it faintly mutters its anathema. Sin only it can apprehend and judge; and for the poor acts of struggling heroism, "Forasmuch as they were not done," &c., &c., it doubts not but they have the nature of sin.[M]
Something of the difficulty has been met by Goethe, but it cannot be said that he has resolved it; or at least that he has furnished others with a solution which may guide their judgment. In the writer of the Book of Job there is an awful moral earnestness before which we bend as in the presence of a superior being. The orthodoxy against which he contended is not set aside or denied; he sees what truth is in it; only he sees more than it, and over it, and through it. But in Goethe, who needed it more, inasmuch as his problem was more delicate and difficult, the moral earnestness is not awful, is not even high. We cannot feel that in dealing with sin he entertains any great horror of it; he looks on it as a mistake, as undesirable, but scarcely as more. Goethe"s great powers are of another kind; and this particular question, though in appearance the primary subject of the poem, is really only secondary. In substance, Faust is more like Ecclesiastes than it is like Job, and describes rather the restlessness of a largely-gifted nature which, missing the guidance of the heart, plays experiments with life, trying knowledge, pleasure, dissipation, one after another, and hating them all; and then hating life itself as a weary, stale, flat, unprofitable mockery. The temper exhibited here will probably be perennial in the world. But the remedy for it will scarcely be more clear under other circ.u.mstances than it is at present, and lies in the disposition of the emotions, and not in any propositions which can be addressed to the understanding.
For that other question--how rightly to estimate a human being; what const.i.tutes a real vitiation of character, and how to distinguish, without either denying the good or making light of the evil; how to be just to the popular theories, and yet not to blind ourselves to their shallowness and injustice--that is a problem for us, for the solution of which we are at present left to our ordinary instinct, without any recognised guidance whatsoever.