wretches resort, subject to the scorn of his tribe, the insolence of the very outcasts whom he had once disdained to rank with the dogs of his flocks, and the laughter and mockery of the children who play about him (see xxx, 1-15). Even his wife, who alone is left to him, gives him no comfort, but bids him "renounce God"": the very sin that Satan is tempting him to commit; the very sin that Job himself, in the days of his prosperity, always feared that his sons might commit (ch. i, 5).

The tale of the great man's downfall spreads abroad, and presently his three Friends, men of exalted station in other parts of the country, approach. At first they do not recognise him, because of the ravages of his disease (ii, 12), but when the dreadful truth is forced upon them, they pass through the crowd of spectators, ascend the mound, and sit down opposite their comrade, on the bare ground, waiting, according to Eastern etiquette, for him to break the silence.30

The great Argument that follows is the object for which the ancient story of the Patriarch's sufferings has been used by the Hebrew poet. The force of the poem is not in the picture of pain presented, but in the discussion concerning it. What then is the question debated? Surely not such a common one as "Why do the wicked live?" or "Why is the world full of tribulation?" Surely not: the great poem has essentially a loftier theme than that; the real debate is

whether the spirit of Man ought to be limited in its search for communion with the divine Spirit. Job's passionate contention was that Religion was made for Man, not Man for Religion. His temptation was to believe in the character of God as depicted in the orthodox manner by the Friends; for, had he done so, he must have renounced God; being too sincere to pretend to faith in the beneficence of a Deity who regulates the affairs of men on the principles accepted and expounded by the religious teachers of his day. He claimed— and he made good his claim, since it was approved by God— that no Religion can be final, but that Mankind is entitled to more revelation and has the right to clamour for it. Once again let it be said that to wrestle with God until He blessed him was the task set him; is it not the task set to every man that is born into the world?

Now I can venture to claim no virtue of scholarship for the indication of passages by which I have tried to make salient the points of this great contention; I can only claim for it a reduction of the fleeting and elusive impressions of logical argument, which haunt the studious reader, to a comprehensible form. Selection of the text for this purpose is by no means without technical excuse; for the Oriental mind seems to have delighted in repetition and the picking up of dropped threads; and Job's answers are often only to be discovered by their relation to passages marked by some words

repeated or phrase imitated (e.g., iv, 7 compared with ix, 2). Moreover, if it be once admitted that the speeches of the Friends form but one and the same contention, it follows that Job's answers may fairly be set against any portion of their argument that may happen to be more vividly enunciated by the words of any one of them than by those of another. And, in fact, the Friends do repeat each other and themselves. The delicate shades of difference between their reasonings, detected by ingenious commentators, were hardly worth the discovery. They are under a natural compulsion to say the same thing, inasmuch as they have accepted the orthodox theory of the impiety of demanding to understand God's dealings with men in a word, they represent the religious opinion of their day.

The Prologue has shown us Job's three friends-Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite, and Zophar the Naamathite,-arriving from their journey across the desert, sitting down on the mound of refuse beside the afflicted Patriarch, and waiting for him to break the silence.

When, after a long interval, he does so at last, his first utterance is a Curse on the day of his birth and a repetition of the old human cry, "Why was I born? Or, if I had to be born, why did I survive my birth?" 31

This outburst of passionate grief gives the Friends the opportunity for which they have been waiting. Eliphaz,

probably the oldest of the three, and, at all events, a native of a reputed land of wisdom-Teman, on the north-east of Edom-is their first spokesman. He at once takes up the position that all calamities are caused by sin, making the doctrine applicable to all men, on the ground that to be human is to be sinful. It seems possible that the Friends may have had some conversation with the Patriarch's wife before they visited him, and may so have learnt his uncompromising attitude of mind, with which she is obviously familiar, as she wonders that he "holds fast his integrity' (ii, 9), using the same phrase as he himself afterwards uses to the Friends (xxvii, 5) and may have already used to her. It is remarkable that the first appearance of the phrase is in the Lord's speech to Satan at their second interview (ii, 3), but I do not know what ought to be deduced from that fact.

This, then, is the Accusation to which Job must plead: that, having been smitten with calamity, he must have sinned, consciously or unconsciously. The doctrine of innate sinfulness, thus enunciated by Eliphaz, with all the solemnity of a supernatural revelation, is emphatically repeated by him in his second speech, is confirmed by Zophar in his first speech, and finally (with a stolid disregard of Job's controversion of it) is explicitly re-stated by Bildad in his last speech.

Job, of course, can give-and does give-amid wild and bitter lamentations, a direct denial to the imputation of wickedness. He is not conscious of any offence, either moral or ceremonial, and he therefore refuses to plead falsely to the God of truth; but he thoroughly understands that appearances are against him, and that he cannot prove his innocence, but must meet the attack in another way. This he does by first opposing that part of the Friends' argument which asserts that all men are infected with original sin and thereby liable to punishment. Like a true logician, he accepts his Friends' contention, only to show the untenable results to which it leads. You say, he tells them, that suffering is the punishment for sin; that all men are sinful, and, therefore, all must suffer. It is true. How can man be just before God, if God be pleased to contend with him? By such action God makes innocence impossible; all labour in the path of virtue is useless; nothing can keep or make a man clean if God chooses to plunge him into the ditch of comparison with himself. Comparison is really out of the question; and, if it were not, who is to judge? "Is it possible," he cries, appealing to God himself, "that thou really hast treated me in this way? scrutinising me so minutely that the detection of sin was rendered certain, and at the same time keeping the record of my transgressions secret? Is it thy way to oppress and despise the work of thine hands? Thou hast framed and