The

poem is larger than its story, it lives in an atmosphere vaster than the scenes it pourtrays. The man is a people, Israel speaks in Job, his problem is its, proposed, urged, followed through to a solution, that the faith of Israel, raised to a purer and higher form, might be preserved, and not perish before the calamities and confusions of a calamitous and confused time. This is not meant to take the individual significance out of the poem, but rather to emphasize it. national reposes on the personal sense, the tragedy that was illustrated by the life of the individual was being played out on a more stupendous scale in the life of the people, with such shock and disturbance of spirit as threatened death to the faith in Jehovah. The problem of Job rose out of this conflict between the ideal and the actual alike in the single and the collective life, and the solution was necessary to the reconciliation of faith with history.

The primitive faith of Israel was, as we have seen,1 simple, suited to a primitive and simple people. Jehovah was Israel's God, Israel was Jehovah's people; He was a righteous God, who rewarded the obedient and punished the disobedient, so righteous that His character and ways always agreed; suffering could not come undeserved, prosperity could not be where penalty was merited. This faith was expressed in the law which was at once the basis and the seal of Israel's freedom; each commandment had for the obedient a promised blessing, for the disobedient a threatened curse. This faith, too, the oldest prophets preached, labouring to persuade the people to faithfulness by disclosing their visions of Jehovah's justice and judg

1 See above, pp. 128, ff.

PROVIDENCE AND HISTORY.

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ments. The righteous were to be "like a tree planted by the rivers of water, that bringeth forth his fruit in his season; his leaf also shall not wither;" but the ungodly were to be "like the chaff which the wind. driveth away.' While fearfulness was to surprise the hypocrite, he who walked righteously and spoke the truth was to dwell on high, safe in the stronghold of rocks, "his bread given unto him, and his water sure."

"2

The more rigorously this faith was held, the more distinctly prosperity became a proof of righteousness, calamity the evidence of ungodliness. Jehovah was active everywhere and in everything; He worked His will in heaven and on earth. Whatever happened, happened through Him and for Him, was either destined to be, or over-ruled in its being, for His ends. His was the will sovereign in history, which but executed or realized His purpose; in His hands were the lives of all flesh, and He so judged that life and lot, character and experience, merit and award, could not but correspond. History was Providence become visible, and Providence could not allow its outward and manifest sign to contradict its inward and real intention. So construed, the faith in Jehovah might well sustain the people in the period of their struggle towards order, might inspire and assure them in their season of conquest and grandeur under David and Solomon, might also strengthen the early prophets in Israel and Judah in their conflict against the idolatries and sins of kings and peoples; but it could not stand in all its stern and simple consistency in the presence of proud wickedness, victorious and invincible, 2 Isa. xxxiii. 15, 16.

Ps. i. 3, 4.

and godliness overwhelmed by disaster and defeat. Yet these belonged to the surest realities of experience and history. Idolatrous empires, like Egypt and Assyria, became mighty and rich, reaching out towards universal dominion, bringing by their mutual jealousies and collisions trouble to the people of God. The saintliest king that ever reigned in Judah perished in battle with the Egyptians, and with him the bravest attempt yet made to realize the prophetic ideal. The godliest men, too, like Jeremiah, sanctified from the womb, the appointed prophets of Jehovah, had seemed elect to suffering and reproach, hated by the priests, persecuted by the king, disbelieved and mocked by the people, forced to speak the word sent unto them to ears that would not hear, able to obey the God whose speakers they were only as they could bear insult and shame. And amid these fierce conflicts and confusions the most faithful appeared the most defenceless man. Wealth and power came to the violent and unscrupulous, loss and want to the obedient and unselfish.

contemplated through the ancient faith the desolations and miseries of the time, the wasted cities, the fallen state, lives made burdensome and miserable through their very goodness, they knew not what to think, began to doubt, to despair, to speak as if God had forsaken or deceived them. Thus Jeremiah cries,1 "Thou, Jehovah, hast deceived, and I let myself be deceived: Thou art stronger than I, and hast prevailed I am in derision daily, every one mocketh me"; and when he feels the necessity to speak on the one hand and the impotence of his speech on the other, he exclaims "Cursed be the day where

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in I was born: let not the day wherein my mother bare me be blest." In Psalm lxxiii. we have the reflection of a similar mental struggle, though it has the calmness that comes after victory rather than the pain and tension of conflict. The writer confesses that he had been "envious at the boastful," his steps had well-nigh slipped when he "saw the prosperity of the wicked." The teaching of history seemed this : "Behold those who prosper in the world, they are the ungodly: they increase in riches"; while the lesson of his own experience was, "Verily I have cleansed my heart in vain, and washed my hand in innocency. For all the day long have I been plagued, and chastened every morning." The remembrance of his doubts is bitter; when they had possession of him he had been "brutish and ignorant," but all the same they show the mental conflict through which he had passed, the struggle it had been to him to reconcile his idea and belief of God with the realities of his own experience and the manifest facts of history.

Now, these contradictions of the ideal and the actual, this conflict of faith and experience, of what ought to have been with what was, caused the rise, not so much of one problem, as of a series of problems, of the deepest and most transforming order, within the religion of Israel. Their rise was a great moment, perhaps the greatest since Moses; marked, if not a revolution, a new development in the religion, the birth of a new spirit and new tendencies. It signified that the religion was awaking to the mystery of evil, to the meaning and the mission of suffering, was coming to perceive that a Deity who was simply the conscious

Ps. lxxiii. 2, 3, 12-14.

and active righteousness of the universe was not a Deity sufficient for man's needs, or able to satisfy man's wants. It was indeed a transcendent moment when Israel began dimly to see that suffering was not simply punitive but also remedial, had another and nobler than the old retributive function, might, as suffering of the innocent, be needed to work out his perfection, and through it the greater good of the world. The monument of this transcendent moment is the Book of Job.

2. But we are not yet in a position to appreciate the full significance of the problem. We have looked at the outer conditions or historical occasions of its rise, but we must now attempt to determine another point, whether it rose in obedience to any inner or organic law of development in the religion; that is, whether it was a mere accident, or a matter of vital and natural growth. Well, then, there is one remarkable fact, and from it our new discussion may most fitly start: the experiences or realities which suggested the problem are common to all religions, but the problem is peculiar to the religion of Israel. Suffering is much the same everywhere, evil is most impartially distributed. The good has often been the most deeply afflicted man; the sorrows of virtue and the pleasures of vice have supplied moralists with a theme ever since moralists were. Pain and death early threw a gloom over the bright Hellenic spirit, and made it now wish the quiet of the grave, now sadly ask whence and why they had come. But the question was philosophical, not religious; the good man doomed to sorrow and loss, the bad man living in happiness and wealth, raised problems in speculation, not in theology. Zeus was himself a being