THE INSPIRATION OF THE BOOK OF JOB.

THE Dean of Westminster's most fascinating book on 1 "Job,"—which places before us a popular summary of all the literature of the subject made by a scholar of large learning, and even larger sympathies,—will perhaps bring home to many of its readers for the first time, that amongst the great histories, prophecies, and lyrics of the Bible, there is to be found a great work of literary art, in which the inspired imagination of the writer ventured to deal with one of the greatest of the problems of human life in just such a form as that which is Mr. Browning's favourite medium of expression,—and certainly one not intended even to suggest to its readers that the story which forms the framework of the poem is in any sense a record of fact. There is probably hardly a book in the Old Testament,— if we except Genesis,—which has been so full of charm for the people as the Book of Job, nor one in which we feel more vividly the whole import of the word " inspiration." And yet, notwithstanding the fact that this book is, in the truest sense, a work of imagination, it is the book of all books in which the meaning which we give to "inspiration" in modern criticism falls most short of the meaning which we give to the word when we speak of the inspiration of the Book of Job. In modern criticism, when we speak of the inspiration of a poem, we mean that the poet's thoughts seam to rush from him with an unconsciousness, an unlabonred spontaneousness, and a rapidity that indicate a source, if not beyond himself, at least beyond his own power of deliberate control; and, as a role, we regard the art which a poet shows in his arrangement and grouping, as rather derogating from his "inspiration," on the ground that art belongs to the reflective imagination as distinguished from that stream of improvisation the origin of which seems, even to the singer himself, to be involved in mystery. Bat in the Book of Job, we feel that inspiration belongs to the art as well as to the poetry, to the invention of the story as well as to the passion of the religions lyrics, and none the less we regard the meaning of the word "inspiration " when applied to this poem, as coming much more nearly to what it means in characterising the " Magnificat" or the " Benedictus," than what it means in characterising the " Skylark " of Shelley or the Hamlet of Shakespeare. The poem of Job, though definitely a work of imaginative literature, is yet a work of inspiration in that highest sense in which in- spiration is the immediate consequence of the flooding of the mind with the direct influence of God. Bacon must have felt this when he wrote in that exquisite little essay on "Adversity," —" Prosperity is the blessing of the Old Testament, adversity is the blessing of the New, which assureth the greater benedic- tion and the clearer revelation of God's favour. Yet even in the Old Testament, if you listen to David's harp, you shall hear as many hearse-like airs as carols ; and the pencil of the Holy Ghost bath laboured more in describing the afflictions of Job than the felicities of Solomon." The theme of the poem,— which is the hasty and arrogant disposition of man to attribute all suffering to the divine displeasure with sin,—the treat- ment of it by presenting the Almighty himself as pointing to the life of Job as one that confutes the superficial scorn of all human goodness which the Adversary of human souls avows,— the fierce trial to which the patriarch is subjected by way of testing the reality of that goodness, the vivid and rapid strokes of calamity which fall upon him, the utter failure of the first attempt to break his faith in God, the repetition of the experiment by the striking-down of the afflicted man with the most frightful and isolating of Eastern diseases,— the visit of the three friends who sit beside him on his ash- heap in sympathetic silence ;—all these preliminaries of the great controversy are painted with strokes as few and majestic as it is possible for the human imagination to conceive. And when Job raises his cry to Heaven, bewails the day of his birth, and passionately yearns for death, we hardly conceive it possible that the tragedy of the situation can be heightened. And yet heightened it is. The grave exhortations of his friends that he should recognise in his calamities the retributive hand of God, rising from the first delicate and tenderly veiled hints at reproof into a fall chorus of vehement rebuke and bitter reprobation, give to the desolation of Job its last and keenest pangs, and fill his mind with the most terrible doubts whether indeed that faith to which he has clung, through all his woes, that there must be some explanation of his sufferings at once compatible with his own innocence and with the goodness and love of God, may not, after all, be a terrible illusion. And it is here that we see the great imaginative depth of the poem. The theme of it is now in a sense transformed, as the Dean of Westminster justly says, from the patience to the impatience of Job. Though Job's innocence is to be vindicated, though his friends' rash judgments on him are to be severely rebuked, though the whole drift of the poem is to be that Job comes out of the fierce trial like doubly refined gold, yet the inspiration of the poet is so truly human as well as divine, so full of the insight into human nature as well as of the love of the divine nature, that Job is not represented as expostulating in any meek or patient or submissive spirit with his friends' harsh judgment. On the contrary, he resents almost fiercely their first hint that he has brought down God's vengeance on some unacknowledged sin, and that he would do well to humble himself for that sin. The more they plead in this key, the more wildly he strikes out against the imputation. Now he seems unable to deny the traditional force of the regular orthodox assumption that it must have been his sin,—instead of, as the reader is aware, his exceptional righteousness,—which has singled him out for this hurricane of calamity ; but then, he is so profoundly conscious of the falsehood of the assumption, that it tempts him to question the goodness of God rather than to confess a sinfulness of which he is absolutely innocent. Now, again, he succeeds in realising that the goodness of God is the deepest certainty of which he has possession, and for a moment he is able to renounce and denounce the false assumption of the reigning orthodoxy, and to prophesy that even if he dies in his misery, he shall yet find his innocence acknowledged and his fidelity rewarded beyond the grave. It is impossible to admire too profoundly the dramatic power with which the poet, under the influence of the divine inspiration, depicts the struggles of Job to reconcile his old and absolute belief in the favour of God for the righteous man, with his equally absolute belief that he has been a true and loving servant of the God who is now pouring upon him this fierce hurricane of anguish.

And in the course of these mental struggles, he gives us the grandest pictures of whatever there may be in human life which seems to correspond to the paradox of his own sufferings. They are not, be tells us, without analogy in what he has seen before. Sufferings which are undeserved visit, he says, not only individuals, but classes, when oppressors succeed, as sometimes they do succeed, in their conspiracies of crime (chap. xxiv., 2-12) ;-

" There are that remove the landmarks ;

They violently take away flocks, and feed them. They drive away the ass of the fatherless, They take the widow's ox for a pledge.

They turn the needy out of the way The poor of the earth hide themselves together.

Behold, as wild asses in the desert

They go forth to their work, seeking diligently for meat ;

The wilderness yieldeth them food for their children.

They cut their provender in the field ; And they glean the vintage of the wicked.

They lie all night naked without clothing, And have no covering in the cold.

They are wet with the showers of the mountains, And embrace the rook for want of a shelter.

There are that pluck the fatherless from the breast, And take a pledge of the poor : So that they go about naked without olothieg.

And being an.hungred they carry the sheaves; They make oil within the walls of these men; They tread their winepresses, and suffer thirst.

From ant of the populous city men groan, And the soul of the wounded orieth out : Yet God impateth it not for folly."

And, again, be depicts, by way of contrast, the ideal standard of justice and mercy on which he, in the plenitude of hie prosperity, as one of the most powerful of the Emirs of Arabia, had himself steadily noted (chap. 'raiz., 7-23) :-

" When I went forth to the gate unto the city,

When I prepared my seat in the street, The young men saw me and hid themselves, And the aged rose up and stood ; The princes refrained talking, And laid their hand on their month ;

The voice of the nobles wee hushed,

And their tongue cleaved to the roof of their mouth.

For when the ear heard me, then it blessed me ;

And when the eye saw me, it gave witness unto me :

Because I delivered the poor that cried, The fatherless also, that had none to help him.

The blessing of him that was ready to perish came upon me And I caused the widow's heart to sing for joy.

I put on righteousness, and it clothed me My justice was as a robe and a diadem.

I was eyes to the blind, And feet was I to the lame.

I was a father to the needy And the cause of him that I knew not I searched out.

And I brake the jaws of the unrighteous, And plucked the prey out of his teeth.

Then I said, I shall die in my nest, And I shall multiply my days as the sand

My root is spread out to the waters,

And the dew lieth all night upon my branch My glory is fresh in me, And my bow is renewed in my band.

Unto me men gave ear, and waited,

And kept silence for my counsel.

After my words they spake not again; And my speech dropped upon them.

And they waited for me as for the rain ; And they opened their month wide as for the latter rain."

Is it possible to conceive a finer contrast than this which is given us of the misery which successful oppression causes to the lowest classes of the Eastern city, and the beneficence of a rule like that at which the patriarch had steadily aimed. And, nevertheless, the very inspiration which aims at magnifying the glory of God by the magnificent pictures of divine power in Nature which the poem gentains, yet compels the poet to shed the most vivid light on the confusion and terror in the soul of this most pious of men, when he finds himself confronted with the false belief,—which he has always hitherto regarded as teaching from on high,—that every calamity which falls upon man is a divine penalty for some past transgression. The inspiration of the poet ie so deep, that even while he makes it his ultimate aim to assert the righteousness of God, he cannot and will not depict the mind of his saint as pros- trating itself before the divine throne in any kind of self-humilia- tion which admits, against the verdict of his own conscience, the justice of his punishment. Unlike David, who, profoundly conscious of his own sin, cried out, " Against thee, thee only, have I sinned, and done this evil in thy sight: that thou mightest be justified when thou epeakest, and be clear when thou judged," the saintly hero of this tragedy persists to the last that no explanation of that kind can justly be given of the misery in which he is plunged.

And, again, the inspiration of the imaginative artist as dis- tinguished from the inspiration of the divine seer, is seen in what the Dean of Westminster very truly points out as the unsatisfac- toriness of the anouement. The saint who clung so passionately at once to the declaration of his own innocence, and to the apparent prevalence of innocent suffering,—nay, of innocent anguish,—in the world, is not comforted by any words, like those of Isaiah as to the beneficent power of innocent suffering to heal the wounds of others, by any forecast of the expiatory character of sacrifice, or any anticipation of the life of him who bore our transgressions ; that would have been out of keeping with the moral atmosphere of the poem, and the mere admission of such a hope would not be consistent with the intensity of the anguish which the Eastern sufferer feels under the calm assump- tion of his friends that he must have brought all this sorrow on himself, for had that assumption not prevailed amongst the pious for many generations, it could not have been made with no much authority and so much effect. The divine voice which justifies Job and condemns his friends, appeals only to the mighty scale of Nature as proving that the secrets of all mystery must be left, and therefore may be trustfully left, in the hands of him who had at once inspired Job with so deep a con- fidence in his righteousness, and so full an assurance that there was some purpose behind his sufferings which was not in any sense retributive. The reader knows that part of that purpose at least was to shame the scorner, and to prove the pure disinterestedness of human piety,—but the sufferer himself is not even allowed to know as much as that. He is but taught to see that he who commands all the secret springs of the universe, including those of the human conscience, must have the right to administer suffering as well as joy to the innocent as well as to the guilty, and that he will certainly not use that right except in wisdom and in mercy. Nothing is more striking than the rigid adherence of the poet to the demonstration of the illimitable might and wisdom of the Creator when he reproves the presumption of Job in questioning his right to torment one of his moat faithful servants. The reproof, grand as its imagina- tive expression is, really amounts to this, and nothing bat this, —' Can you, who have not the least guess of the purposes for which I create the stars and the monsters of the deep, or of the means by which I control them, presume to doubt that I may use human anguish as a minister of blessed results to man, even though that anguish has no shadow of a penal character P' And undoubtedly, if, as the Dean of West- minster appears to think, the poem of Job was written later than many of the Psalms, and earlier than the Book of Isaiah, where the first glimpse of the power of vicarious suffering as a divine instrument is given to us, this is the natural and appropriate character of the divine teaching for such a time as this,—the time when it was first discovered that there was much suffering in the world which was not penal, and when yet no one had caught a glimpse of the truth that suffering which is not penal may be, and often must be, beneficent. The inspiration of this grand poem is as full of the human fitness of place and time, as it is fall of the highest vision which any man living at that place and time could have had of the divine glory.