JOB XIX. 25-27 91
and complete declaration in eveiy moral subject, we shall instantly fall into misery of unbelief. Our whole happiness and power of energetic action depend upon our being able to breathe and live in the cloud ; content to see it opening here and closing there ; rejoicing to catch, through the thinnest films of it, glimpses of stable and substantial things ; but yet perceiving a nobleness even in the concealment, and rejoicing that the kindly veil is spread where the untempered light might have scorched us, or the infinite clearness wearied.^
"Only the Dark! . . . Only the Mystery! . . ." He said. " Only beyond, above, before ! , . . Only — 0 Captives of the wave-walled shore ! — Only the incommensurable sea ! . . .
Only, for eyes that all too wisely see
The sun at midday, and are blind therefore, Only the Dark — where, lambent to the core, Gyre the great stars' deepening galaxy ! . . .
Only of ignorance the ancient wrong ; Only of life the viewless counterpart ; Only of truth the secret undivined;
Only — new ranges for the feet of song, New loves of the inextinguishable heart, New powers of the imperishable mind ! . . . " ^
4. Job turns from the present to the future, from his present misery and perplexity to a coming vindication. For, after all, as Job would have said to himself, this horrid confusion and contra- diction must come to an end. There are not two Gods. The God who deals with me so harshly in providence and the God who speaks to me in my heart are one Being, and He must make His ways plain ; He must reveal Himself, and declare Himself to be upon my side. Where that will take place, or how, or in what state of being, or whether in the body or out of the body. Job could not have told ; but somehow and somewhere in the future God will be seen, God will vindicate his case, and Job will be there to see Him.
^ God is better to us than our best desires, and gives a larger blessing than our fullest prayers. The incised rock and molten lead are not to hand, but a place is given to the suffering preacher in that " finer world of books within the world," yea, in that finest
- Ruskiu, Modern Painters ( JVorks, vi. 89).
^ George Cabot Lodge, "The Noctambiilist " {Poems and Dramas, ii. 154).
92 I KNOW THAT MY REDEEMER LIVETH
book-world of all — the Bible — so that, instead of speaking in one language, he speaks in hundreds, and where he might have reached the eyes of only a few solitary pilgrims he now addresses the hearts of myriads and shall have an increasing congregation for evermore. " God is not unrighteous to forget our work of faith and labour of love," and fervency of missionary desire ; but treats us with ineffable generosity, and rewards our poor and faltering work with unsearchable riches —
No life is lost, no hope is vain,
No prayer without a sequent deed ; He turns all seeming loss to gain.
And finds a soil for every seed. '^
Some fleeting glance He doth endow,
He sanctifies some casual word. Unconscious gifts His children show,
For all is potent with the Lord.^
III.
Job's Conviction.
1. " I know." Job holds fast the living truth in his own life, and in so doing, lays fast hold of God. He will not deny the clear convictions of his spirit within him, and take refuge in the con- ventional platitudes of his friends. Their utterances are honoured and hoary, and sanctioned by high authority. The canons of the Fathers and the visions of the orthodox are set in array against him; and he has nothing to set against them except his con- sciousness of passionate sincerity and great living convictions of righteousness that have taken his life by storm, and made it their own. Yet this is enough. It is the living man, not the formulated creed, that stands nearest to God. In the truth that lived and conquered in his own life Job became assured of the living supremacy of the God that would vindicate that truth.
Job's assurance is based on his own past experience, on his life with God, on his consciousness of being a God-fearing man, and on his ineradicable convictions in regard to the nature of God and His relations to men. Job's circumstances cause his principle to appear in its barest form : the human spirit is conscious of fellow-'^ 1 J. Clifford, Daily Strength for Daily Living, 323.
JOB XIX. 25-27 93
ship with God, and this fellowship, from the nature of God, is a thing imperishable, and, in spite of obscurations, it must yet be fully manifested by God, This principle, grasped with convulsive earnestness in the prospect of death, became the Hebrew doctrine of immortality. This doctrine was but the necessary corollary of religion. In this life on earth the true relations of men and God were felt to be realized ; and the Hebrew faith of immortality — never a belief in the mere existence of the soul after death, for the lowest popular superstition assumed this — was a faith that the dark and mysterious event of death should not interrupt the life of the person with God enjoyed in this world.^