GOD AND RELIGION.

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reign of righteousness, the prosperity of the good, the humiliation of the wicked. As He was, so must the service of Him be. In a religion that was not moral, in a piety that was not ethical obedience, He could have no delight. A worship that was mere ceremonial could not be worship of Him: a law that was simply sacerdotal could be no law of His. The two notions of religion, the heathen and the Hebraic, stand expressed for us in the words of Micah, placed, too, in living and instructive relation to their respective ideas of God. The people, heathen in heart, ask, like Balak, king of Moab, when he consulted Balaam :

"Wherewith shall I come before Jehovah, bow myself before the high God? Shall I come before Him with burnt offerings, with calves of a year old? Will Jehovah be pleased with thousands of rams, with ten thousands of rivers of oil? Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?"

But the prophet, speaking for Jehovah, declares the only service that can satisfy Him, defines the only religion He approves :

"He hath showed to thee, O man, what is good; and what doth Jehovah require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?"

3. In this idea of God, and the consequent notion of religion, lies involved the mission of Israel, the secret he was charged to tell to the world. His possession

of this secret gave him his place in history, to speak it was his work. The measure of his success in fulfilling

Micah vi. 6-8.

his mission is the degree in which he has made his faith man's, his secret a message of glad tidings to the world. The result lies written on the broad face of history, lives embodied in the beliefs of civilized mankind. Yet the outward hides through its very magnitude the immensity of the inward result. What the new idea of God and the new notion of religion have done for man we may not attempt to tell. They have changed him within and without, strengthened all his moral qualities, created in him a nobler and sterner ethical spirit, exalted his ideal of manhood, brought elements into his social and collective life that have enormously enriched his best civilizations. Our order is not the Greek cosmos, the beautiful but merciless harmony that man could not but admire, that yet crushed without pity the man who touched it. Our order is moral, the reign of a living and righteous will, which never spares guilt, but is ever merciful to the guilty. Our conception of the universe, of Providence, of the law that is supreme over man and his destiny, is penetrated through and through with moral ideas. From these we cannot escape, we conceive of them as reigning in the time that is our own, in the eternity that is God's, yet reigning as the God who pities, and not as pitiless law. Let these facts and beliefs, with all that they imply, witness that Israel has not lived in vain. Jehovah called Israel out of Egypt to serve Him, and Israel's service of Jehovah has been in the noblest sense service of man.

THE PROBLEM OF JOB.

"And the Lord said unto Satan, Hast thou considered My servant Job, that there is none like him in the earth, a perfect and an upright man, one that feareth God, and escheweth evil?"-Job i. 8

THE Book of Job is a work not simply of literary but of living interest, a wonder in that most wonderful body of ancient literature, so deeply studied, so little known, our Hebrew Scriptures. It appeals in an equal degree to the imagination and the reason, to the one as philosophy, the grandest product of the Hebrew wisdom; to the other as poetry, the highest achievement on this field of the Hebrew, or rather of the Semitic spirit, the ripe and fragrant fruit not so much of a man's or a people's genius as of the genius of a race. It stands there the work of a nameless Man; no one can tell who he was, or where and when and how he lived; yet he so lived as to be one of our mightiest immortals, leaving all that made. him what he was, the questions that vexed him, the thoughts that possessed him, the faith that consoled him, the hopes that transmuted and glorified his sorrows, set here as to everlasting music. That is an immortality modesty itself need not blush to own: the Man nameless, but his speech and his spirit alive and articulate for evermore.

The Book may be described as a theodicy in poetry, first and still supremest of its kind, parent of an immense offspring. It shows man's despair in the presence of his last perplexity, but shows it that he may be seen to vanquish it in the only noble and sufficient way, by so vindicating the ways of God as to bring man to higher and truer and surer faith in Him. It is a book in the best sense veracious throughout, true alike to the saddest facts of human life and to the loftiest claims of faith, stands as remote from the optimism that seeks to justify God by making light of evil, as from the pessimism that seeks to condemn or deny God by being blind to good. It looks misery full in the face, looks at it where it has least right to be, but where it often most surely is, in the home and heart of the good man; looks at him, not as he is in the ideal region where things are as they ought to be, but as he is in the world of hard and prosaic yet most tragic fact, in contact and conflict with the saddest realities, an innocent sufferer, but held to be a sufferer not innocent, driven by misery and unmerited blame to the doubt, the despair, the anguish that becomes anger at God and man. And then, when it has bravely made us see evil having its will and doing its worst, powerfully helped by the conduct of well meaning but narrowminded men, it turns our faces towards the good, brings the light of eternity into time, and makes us hear what God can say to the perplexed and sorrowful, smitten by His hand while obedient to His will. And here the nameless Man shows his courage as much by his silence as by his speech; he is content to leave a shadow on the face of nature, though a shadow that only brightens the light on the face of

THEODICY IN POETRY.

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God. He leaves us comforted but not satisfied, like men who have seen enough of the dawn to know that the darkness is past and the day at hand, bringing with it the light that makes life radiant with joy. Yet between his first word and his last he has made us know and feel many things, has started questions that deepen the nature, strengthen and purify the spirit, awe and uplift the soul. He has so used evil as to make us think more truly of God, as to touch us with a new sense of the majesty of His being and the mystery of His working, as to inform our worship with reverence and our obedience with reality. He who has never felt the shadow of evil can never know the holiest mysteries of love; he who reveals the saddest perplexities of life creates in man a new sense for God, gives to God a new meaning for man. To conceive Job's problem, and to have our faces turned towards the solution, is to come nearer the heart of all things, the God who is too much the Father of man to leave him an untroubled, undisciplined, and unexercised child.

I.

1. In coming to the problem of Job, we must attempt to come to it as the nameless Author came. It is an old problem now, surrounded by a waste of most arid speculations, dreary even to think of; it was a new problem then, torn, as it were, out of the tribulations of the spirit, wrestled with in the deepest anguish of soul and unto sorest sweat and blood. Within the words we now so calmly read, a heart once throbbed in pain; the man had learned in suffering what he here struggles to teach in song. The history of the

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