Not in the hour of peril, thronged with foes, Panting to set their heel upon my head, Or when alone from many wounds I bled
Unflinching beneath Fortune's random blows ;
Not when my shuddering hands were doomed to close The unshrinking eyelids of the stony dead ; — Not then I missed my God, not then — but said:
" Let me not burden God with all man's woes ! "
But when resurgent from the womb of night
Spring's oriflamme of flowers waves from the sod ; When peak on flashing alpine peak is trod
By sunbeams on their missionary flight;
When heaven-kissed earth laughs, garmented in light; — That is the hour in which I miss my God.^
3. Now while the problem of the Book of Job is always a problem, it does not always press upon men in exactly the same way. The existence of evil and the fact of death, poverty, and disease are still felt to be hard to bear and harder to explain. But the great perplexity of our day is due to the decay of authority. This age has been called the age of criticism, an age in which every belief and institution inherited from the past is called upon to show its credentials, and in which, at least for educated men, there is no possibility of evading the duty of examining them, and endeavouring to the best of their ability to distinguish what is accidental and changeable from that which is essential and of permanent value. What, then, is the best course for those who are born in such a time to follow ?
(1) There are many at the present day who tell us that, in view of the progress of science and the results of critical inquiry, the only rational course is to adopt an Agnosticism which gives ^ Mathilde Blind, Poems, 140.
JOB XIII. 15 51
up as hopeless the whole problem of religion ; that is to say, all the great problems of human life and destiny. Guided by a very narrow view of science, they advise ns to repudiate the great heritage of religious thought and life which has been accumulated by all the labours and sacrifices of the past, because it centres in a belief for which, in their view, scientific evidence is wanting. They think, like Job's wife, that the difficulties which try our faith are a sufficient reason for renouncing it altogether.
^ If a thinker had no stake in the unknown, no vital needs, to live or languish according to what the unseen world contained, a philosophic neutrality and refusal to believe either one way or the other, would be his wisest cue. But, unfortunately, neutrality is not only inwardly difficult, it is also outwardly unrealizable, where our relations to an alternative are practical and vital. This is because, as the psychologists tell us, belief and doubt are living attitudes, and involve conduct on our part. Our only way, for example, of doubting, or refusing to believe, that a certain thing is, is continuing to act as if it were not. If, for instance, I refuse to believe that the room is getting cold, I leave the windows open and light no fire just as if it still were warm. If I doubt that you are worthy of my confidence, I keep you uninformed of all my secrets just as if you were unworthy of the same. If I doubt the need of insuring my house, I leave it uninsured as much as if I believed there were no need. And so, if I must not believe that the world is Divine, I can only express that refusal by declining ever to act distinctively as if it were so, which can only mean acting on certain critical occasions as if it were not so, or in an irreligious way. There are, you see, in- evitable occasions in life when inaction is a kind of action, and must count as action, and when not to be for is to be practically against ; and in all such cases strict and consistent neutrality is an unattainable thing.^
(2) There are others who tell us that the only safe course is to shut our ears to every doubt and difficulty, and simply to adhere to every element in the faith. They bid us follow Job's friends in simply reaffirming the forms of doctrine we have inherited, and refusing to pay any regard to the new questions which our new experience — the experience of a world which, both in know- ledge and in action, has been carried far beyond any previous generation — inevitably presents for our consideration.
1 W. James, The Will to Believe, 54.
52 TRUST INEXTINGUISHABLE
(3) Both these alternatives are counsels of despair, and they both lead to a narrowing of human life and thought ; in the one case by a scepticism which gives up as hopeless all endeavour to throw light upon the ultimate meaning of our lives, and abandons all those beliefs in which the best of our race have found their greatest support and stimulus ; in the other case by making our religion an adherence to the tradition of the past rather than an immediate living experience of the present.
The spiritual life of man cannot detach itself from its religious root without withering and decaying ; but neither can it continue to exist without growing. Neither Scripture nor reason gives any encouragement to such a desperate alternative between " all " and " nothing," between Agnosticism and a faith which is fixed once for all and has no possibility of growth.