JOB'S HAPPY ESTATE.

THE

HE book of Job is one of the most remarkable in the Old Testament. Apart from its inspiration, and considered simply as a literary production, it bears the stamp of uncommon genius. It is occupied with a profound and difficult theme, the mystery of divine providence in the sufferings of good men. This is not treated in the abstract, in simple prose or in a plain didactic method. But an actual case is set vividly before the reader, in which the difficulty appears in its most aggravated form. By an extraordinary accumulation of disasters a man of unexampled piety is suddenly cast down from his prosperity, and reduced to the most pitiable and distressed condition.

And then there is delineated in the most masterly manner the impression made on others by the spectacle of these calamities, as well as the inward conflict stirred in the sufferer himself, his bewilderment and sore distress, his alternations of despair and hope, his piteous entreaties for a sympathy which is denied him, and his irritation under the unjust suspicions and censures which are cast upon him, his wild and almost passionate complaints against the Providence which crushes him, intermingled with expressions of strong confidence in God which he cannot abandon. This wild tumult in his soul is graphically depicted in its successive stages, until we are brought to the final solution of the whole, and the vindication at once of the providence of God and of His suffering servant. And all this is set forth in the loftiest style of poetry, abounding in fine imagery and containing passages of deep pathos as well as of rare sublimity and power; while the whole presentation and treatment of the case is managed with consummate skill.

The book of Job well deserves the high encomiums which have been bestowed upon it as a product of the poetic art. And while we humbly receive its inspired lessons, there is no reason why we should be insensible to its graceful beauty, or refuse to recognize its other attractions. The Bible is not, indeed, amenable to the laws of criticism, nor to be judged of by ordinary standards of taste. When God speaks to us, we must reverently listen and obey, however homely the medium through which He communicates His will. And yet it adds to the variety of this holy book, and to its adaptation to the needs of all classes of men, and to all the cravings of the human soul, that it addresses itself likewise to the refined taste and the cultivated sense. Like the inexhaustible supplies of Nature in its manifold diversity, the volume of divine revelation gives us not only the massive granite and the ponderous metal, but the sparkling and polished gems of thought; not only the staple articles of food, but the rarer and more palatable delicacies. So that

the charms and the embellishments of poetic genius, which invest other subjects with such attractions, are lent likewise to the sacred oracles in the sweet lyrics of David, the impassioned fire of Isaiah, and the marvellous beauty of the book of Job.

The principal personage of this book, and the one about whom the interest chiefly centres, is Job himself, a venerable and patriarchal character, whose fortunes are detailed to us at an important crisis of his life. Some have thought that he was not a real, historical person, and that the narrative of the book is not one of events which actually took place, but that it is rather a fiction or a parable like that of the Prodigal Son or the good Samaritan, and he is designed to represent not some one person to whom all this happened precisely as is here detailed, but a whole class, such as is often met with in real life, of similar character and similar experiences, and the truth of which lies in its general contormity to what repeatedly takes. place, and in the correctness of the lessons

conveyed. This, however, cannot have been the case. It is related not as a parable, but as a history, instructive throughout, as all the Bible histories are, but still an actual, veritable occurrence. And Job is spoken of in other parts of Scripture as a real person, and in connection with other real persons like Noah and Daniel, and the events of his life are referred to in a manner which implies that they had actually occurred. We can have no doubt, therefore, that, with all the poetic embellishment of the narrative, Job did actually live, and the history took place substantially as it is here related.

That which is in this chapter proposed for consideration in the life of Job is his character and condition when he is first introduced to our notice, his great excellence and piety and his happy, prosperous state, as these are sketched briefly, but strongly, in the opening verses of the first chapter, and again in chap. xxix., where, after his gloomy reverses, Job pathetically recalls the joys of former years.

We commonly think of Job as a sufferer;