The flame, the storm, the quaking ground, Earth's joy, earth's terror, nought is thine, Thou must but hear the sound Of the still voice divine.
0 priceless art ! 0 princely state !
E'en while by sense of change opprest, Within to antedate
Heaven's Age of fearless rest.^
(2) The life of humanity on earth is exactly typified by all that part of the drama of Job's life which lies between its prologue and its epilogue, between its supernatural beginning and its supernatural ending. Through all that long story of a man — full, as it is, of tragic interest — what is the very sorest trial to which it has ever been subjected, to which it still is and , always must be subject ? It is not merely the calamities, the vj sorrows of life, which come to all ; it is the added suffering of the r ^ J. H. Newman, Verses oil Various Occasions, 20.
JOB XIX. 25-27 85
mystery of these sorrows. It is the thought of the apparent carelessness and capriciousness with which the joys and the pains of existence seem to be scattered among the children of the "^ common Father. It is that suffering in this life seems to be neither penal nor yet remedial, but seems to come, as the rains of heaven fall and the winds blow, on just and unjust alike. It is that there is so much apparent waste and gratuitous suffering, so much purely useless and purposeless agony. It is that human lives seem wasted by myriads, poured out on the earth like water, seemingly unregarded, unpitied, unaided, unrequited. Suffering humanity, wherever it still retains its faith in a Divine Lord and Euler, is still haunted by this question : " Why is it thus with us ? " Like Job, too, it has been sorely vexed by false comforters, ^ would-be friends who preach and lecture and rebuke and exhort, but who cannot console, because they cannot solve that enigma with which every sufferer finds himself confronted : " Why, if God is good and just, does He thus afflict me?" Surely the analogy is perfect here. Humanity seems to have still the old choice presented to it : to curse God and die ; or to die believing in and blessing Him, and yet with a thousand reasons why it should not believe in, why it should not bless or praise, the Being who thus seems causelessly to afflict it. And the message — the inspired message of this type of our race to all who strive to believe in a Father, though they have no visible and sensible proof of a Father's love — is this : " Believe as I did, although such proof be lacking. Believe as I did, in spite of all the seeming disproof that you see and feel. Believe that God is your Father ; believe that He will — indeed, must, because He is your righteous Father — do for you what He has done for me. Believe that for you, too, there is an avenger ; one who will yet give you victory over all that now afflicts you. Believe that you shall yet see for yourselves the loving Father who is hidden from you now. Believe that a day is coming for you when you will discover that there was a need for all you mourn under ; when you will receive from your Father double for all that He has done unto you."
The throb of Thy infinite life I feel
In every beat of my heart ! Upon me hast Thou set eternity's seal!
For ever alive, as Thou art.
86 I KNOW THAT MY REDEEMER LIVETH
I know not thy mystery, 0 my God,
Nor yet what my own life means, That feels after Thee, through the mould and the sod,
And the darkness that intervenes.
But I know that I live, since I hate the wrong,
The glory of truth can see ; Can cling to the right with a purpose strong,
Can love and can will with Thee.^
J (3) The cry of the patriarch is the utterance of the desire of humanity. But it is more ; it is a prophecy ; it points forward to the completed drama of another life, in which once more appears, as in this older drama, the supernatural controlling the natural. Once more we see, behind the veil of the material and the visible, the Divine power that rules and overrules all things for good. We see once more a righteous sufferer, holy, harmless, undefiled, whose whole life was spent in absolutely perfect submission to the will of his Father in Heaven, and who was yet y a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, and whose sorest sorrow and deepest grief sprang from the intensity of His sympathy with His sorrowing and suffering fellow-men. We see Him rejected, despised, hated of those He loved so well, dying at last a death of shame and agony, which was regarded by those who inflicted it as the just punishment for offences against the laws of His country and His God, and we hear from Him in the moment of His supremest agony just that appeal to the justice and to the love of God which suffering has wrung from the heart of the righteous sufferer in all ages: "My God, my God! why-^ hast thou forsaken me ? " ^