Job was a typical saint. According to Divine testimony there was " none like him on the earth." If Job's piety had turned out to be selfish and self-seeking, what hope could there be of others ? So much hinged upon this. The vindication of Job would also be a vindication of human piety at its best. It was well worth Job's suffering to expose the Satanic fallacy. It was worth all the endurance to turn back the edge of that cruel suspicion, npt only against Job, but also against men of Job's spirit throughout the ages.
^ Every one who values the highest interests of his race must look with deep pity upon the efforts of many whose chief aim it seems to be to depreciate humanity, and to show their ingenuity only by repeating, in every varied form, the old question of the mocking spirit, " Doth Job fear God for nought ? " There is a literature which makes it its pleasure to depict affection that it may trace its slow decline, and to analyse human nature that it
JOB I. 9 9
may exhibit its meanness, which when it paints goodness gives us the superficial gilding of a paltry amiability, and puts heart after heart into its crucible that it may reduce all to dross. It passes with many for deep knowledge of the world, and finds its refrain from some worn-out men of pleasure who repeat "vanity of vanities " with another aim than the " Preacher," and from some younger men who affect the worn-out style as lending them, at an easy price, the air of insight and old experience. After all, it is a shallow philosophy, and unhappy as shallow, which degrades human nature and casts doubt on the Divine, and leaves us to infer that dust and ashes are all that is.^
^ I cannot but enter the most emphatic and earnest protest I am capable of uttering against the dreary mechanical utili- tarianism which would resolve even secular life into one vast scheme of selfishness. The world, all that is best and noblest in the world, does not act from purely selfish motives. There are grand lives lived, there are noble deaths died, by statesmen, by soldiers, by sailors, by clergymen, by doctors, by travellers, by common stokers on our railways, and common miners in our coal pits, for the sole love of England, or of Humanity, with no tinge of a base self-seeking nature in the hearts that thus labour and thus fall. Not from any cold-blooded calculations of gain come such lives and deaths, but from the influence of the Spirit of God, from which cometh every good, true, noble, brave thought and deed that ever glows in the soul of man, and burns itself into action upon earth.^
^ Miss Anna Swanwick, the translator of the dramas of -r^Eschylus, formed a class of shop girls and servants. Once when she was trying to interest them in Milton, some one suggested that instruction in arithmetic would be more useful, considering their work and future. She thought not, but resolved to leave it to themselves to decide. So at their next meeting she put the question to them, Which do you prefer — instruction in the poets or in book-keeping ? and, not to hasten their decision, left them to discuss it among themselves, telling them that she would come back for their answer. When she returned she found that only two of the girls were in favour of what bore upon their ordinary work ; all the rest wished what would take them away from it or lift them above it.^
2. It is also an accusation against God. — The arrow launched
^ John Ker, Sermons, 112.
* T. Teignmouth Shore, Some Difficulties of Belief, 212.
» W. L. Watkinson, The Ashes of Roses, 195.
lo UNSELFISHNESS OF TRUE RELIGION
at Job flies farther: in the end it reaches God Himself. If Satan is right, it is not only that there is no such thing as disinterested goodness, but God Himself is robbed of His highest and noblest attribute. If He can no longer win the hearts, and retain in joy and sorrow the reverential affection of those on whom He showers His benefits; if He can no longer inspire anything but a mercenary love. He may be all-powerful still, but there are surely those among our fellow-creatures, whom some of us know or have known, who must come before Him in our homage. Heaven and earth are no longer full of His glory. Vital is the question which the challenge stirs, and rightly has it been said, that in the coming contest, Job is the champion, not of his own character only, but of all who care for goodness, and of God Himself.
^ If the prologue be an integral part of the poem, we have here the key to the interpretation of Job. In the incisive words of A. B. Davidson : " This question — Doth Job serve God for nought ? — is the problem of the book." But the difficulty is just to read the poem in this light. And the learning and insight which Davidson and his great confreres, Delitzsch and Dillmann, have applied to the problem throw the difficulty into still clearer relief. It is not merely that the bearing of Job is different ; but the whole centre of interest changes. In the poem, the Satan and his cynical assaults on human goodness vanish. It is no longer Job's piety, but God's justice, that is in question. As even Godet admits, " The Being who is brought to the bar of judgment is in reality not Job, it is Jehovah. The point in debate is not only the virtue of Job ; it is, at the same time, and in a still higher degree, the justice of God." And Job is now the Prometheus who boldly joins issue with the Almighty. The problem of the poem is to reconcile faith in God with the inequalities of His Providence. And it ends in God's appearing, not to reveal to His steadfast servant the meaning of His sufferings, but to vindicate His own character as worthy of trust and love.^