The Heresy of Job

Job was a type of Humanity, cast forth upon this dust-heap that we call the Earth, there to be taught that the search for an infinite God must be an infinite search. He was not a sceptic; he did not deny God or reject Religion; but he was a heretic, inasmuch as he could not accept the teaching of Religion as final, and, like Jesus, he vindicated the right of all men to seek God in their own way: "God is a Spirit, and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth."The heresy of Job, by the genius of a poet who lived perhaps in the period following the return of the Jews from Babylon (538 B.C.), became one of the grandest epic utterances ever given to the world. Its scope is the relation between God and man; its effect is a vast emancipation--no less than a freeing of the human spirit from thraldom to an idol, the god of a religion, into the "glorious liberty" of a fearless search for the God of the universe.No one, I think, who has deeply and without prejudice studied the Colloquies between Job and his friends can doubt that his ordeal was nothing less than a temptation to accept an idea of God that he could not honestly accept instead of continuing to seek God for himself. In other words, the ---burden laid upon him was to decide whether he would consent to be blessed by the apparent representatives of God -- upon earth, or whether he would wrestle with God until be blessed him. That God did in the end bless him, in spite of his friends' accusations of blasphemy, is the moral of the poem.But though the candid and careful reader of the Book of Job must feel that this is the true meaning of the argument contained in the Colloquies, he must also feel that it is not stated in any direct and logical sequence. My object is to r follow the track of Job's reasoning across the wondrous land of Oriental imagery through which it passes. To anyone who has wandered over those beautiful mountains and many times lost his way, a clue to the path of understanding cannot be unacceptable; and I will confidently maintain that whoever finds in the Book of Job nothing but a fine exposition of the mystery of sin and suffering, has never found the road that leads to a complete survey of the poet's landscape.