is not, therefore, a necessary assumption. The poem is probably founded on historical facts, indeed; and there may be some veritable fact in the experience of the historic Job behind the sentence, "Then Jehovah answered Job out of the tempest.' When his mind was prepared for a Divine intervention by the wise and friendly words of Elihu, a great tempest may have forced it away from his personal interests and from the fierce polemic with the Friends-and these great convulsions of Nature are very potent in suddenly dwarfing all personal interests and hushing all strifes-to thoughts of the unfathomable power and majesty of God, and the folly of striving with Him. A storm may have set him thinking, and thinking in a new and healthier direction. Or the "tempest" in his own soul may have sufficed to prepare him for thoughts such as those to which the Poet here gives expression.

But what, after all, have we to do with all this? Nothing is more futile, in dealing with any great work of imagination, than the endeavour to separate the real from the ideal, to look through the flowing outlines and rich tender colours to the dry bones of fact which lie beyond and within them? It is enough, or should be enough, for us to know that, in his heart at least, Job heard a Divine voice remonstrating with him, appealing to him. However he may have reached it, we may at least be quite sure that the Poet did reach the conviction that in this Answer there are truths of a force and potency to end and crown the long strife of thought through which he has conducted us; and that he received these truths, since they were high beyond his unassisted reach, by direct inspiration from Heaven. And what need we know, or ask, beyond this?

6. In point of form the Theophany divides itself into a First Divine Remonstrance, extending from Chapter xxxviii. Verse 2, to Chapter xxxix. Verse 30, or to Chapter xl. Verse 5, if we include Job's response to it; and a Second Divine Remonstrance, conducted on the same lines as the First, extending from Chapter xl. Verse 7, to Chapter xli. Verse 34, or, including Job's response, to Chapter xlii. Verse 6.

FIRST DIVINE REMONSTRANCE.

CHAPTERS XXXVIII. 1-XL. 5.

WHEN the Majesty of Heaven appears to his afflicted servant, He is very far from doing that which Job had demanded and expected of Him; but, if He does other, He does better than it had entered the heart of Job to conceive. He transcends, instead of following, the anticipated lines of action. In asserting his own righteousness Job had impeached the righteousness of God. He had challenged his Judge to try him, to put him to the proof. And he had expected, as we learn from Chapter xiii. Verse 22,1 that, if God responded to his challenge, He would accuse and question him, or that He would suffer Job to question Him, and to set Him on justifying his ways. In the blindness of his grief and passion, in short, Job was wholly occupied with himself, as in similar conditions we are all apt to be, and conceived of God as having nothing else to do than to vindicate Himself to him, and to solve the problems by which he was oppressed. But when Jehovah appears and speaks, He makes no attempt to vindicate Himself; He offers no solution of the problems with which Job had wearied himself in vain. He is Himself the solution of them. Not by what He says, but by manifesting Himself as He is, He reaches and satisfies the heart of Job-as indeed He satisfies us all, if only we can see Him when He appears and hear Him when He speaks to us.

He opens his First Remonstrance with a single upbraiding sentence (Chap. xxxviii. 2), in which He affirms Job to be altogether on the wrong tack; and then proceeds at once to cause "all his glory "-which means all his goodness-to pass before his face. And as Job listens to the sublime descant in which the Maker of all things discloses the splendours of his loving-kindness no less than of his power as manifested in earth and sky, in land and sea, in calm and storm, in light and darkness, in the grass of the field, in bird and beast (Chaps. xxxviii. 4-xxxix. 30), he sees Him; i.e., he comes to

1 See also Chap. xxiv. 1, et seq.

know both God and himself far more truly and deeply than he had ever done before. He is amazed at his own temerity in having challenged a Power and a Righteousness beyond the reach of his thought; in place of any longer insisting on his own unimpeachable integrity, he confesses that he is "vile:" and he casts from him the doubts, born of ignorance and wounded self-love, over which he had brooded so long, although they are still unresolved; or, rather, he lets them drop as no longer worth a moment's thought now that he sees God face to face (Chap. xl. 1-5).

At no point is our Poet truer to experience and the facts of human life than here. For, in our hours of pain and doubt and misgiving, the apparent difficulties round which our thoughts circle in endless flight are seldom our real difficulties. When we most earnestly crave a solution for the questions which baffle our intellect, what we really need after all is not so much an answer to these questions as a new and larger experience, a gracious and sacred emotion, which will carry us clean out of the intellectual arena, all choked with dust of our own making, into the pure upper air which is all suffused with a Divine Love, and which will quicken in us, or intensify a sense of the Love which watches over us, a Love that does not "alter where it alteration finds," but shines on for ever, and is "the star to every wandering bark." And very often we, like Job, are led to the assurance that the good God loveth us" through the conviction that "He made and loveth all."

CHAPTERS XXXVIII.-XL.

CHAP. XXXVIII. Then Jehovah answered Job out of the tempest and

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Or who laid its corner-stone,

When the stars of morning sang in concert,
And all the Sons of God shouted for joy?

Or who shut in the sea with doors

When it burst forth from the womb;
When I made the clouds the garments thereof,
And thick mists its swaddling clothes ;
When I measured my bound for it,
And set bars and gates,

And said, "Thus far shalt thou come, but no farther,
And here shall the pride of thy waves be stayed"?
Hast thou ever commanded that it be morning,
And caused the dawn to know its place,
That it should seize hold upon the skirts of the earth,
And shake the wicked out of it?

She is changed like clay under a signet,
And [all things] stand out as in gay attire;
But the light is withholden from the wicked,
And the uplifted arm is broken.
Hast thou gone down to the fountains of the sea,
Or traversed the recesses of the deep?
Have the gates of death been opened unto thee,
Or hast thou seen the portals of the realm of shades?
Hast thou surveyed the breadths of the earth?
Say, if thou knowest it all!

Which is the path to the abode of light,
And the darkness-where is its dwelling?
For [doubtless] thou didst lead it to its place,
And art acquainted with the path to its abode!
Thou knowest it, for thou wast then born,
And vast is the number of thy days!
Hast thou entered the storehouse of the snow,
And seen the arsenals of the hail,
Which I reserve for the time of trouble,
For the day of conflict and of war?
How is the light distributed,

And the East wind scattered over the earth?
Who hath cleft a channel for the rain-torrent,
Or a track for the flash of thunder,
That it may rain on an unpeopled land,
On a desert where no man is,

To saturate the wilds and wastes,
And to make the pastures put forth their herbage?
Hath the rain a father?

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Or who begat the dewdrops?

From whose womb came forth the ice,

And the hoarfrost of heaven-who hath engendered it,
That the waters should be hardened as into stone,
And the surface of the deep cohere?

Canst thou fasten the links of the Cluster;
Canst thou unloose the fetters of the Giant?
Canst thou bring forth the Constellations in their season?
The Bear and her offspring-canst thou guide them?
Knowest thou the ordinances of heaven?
Canst thou determine their influence upon the earth?
Canst thou lift thy voice to the clouds,
That an abundance of waters may overhang thee?
Canst thou send forth the lightnings so that they go,
Or will they say to thee, "We are here!"
Who hath put [this] wisdom into thy reins,
Or who hath given [such] understanding to thine heart ?
Who by wisdom can count the clouds,

Or slant the bottles of heaven,
As when the dust cakes into mire,
And clod cleaveth fast to clod?

Wilt thou hunt prey for the Lion,
Or still the craving of his whelps,
When they crouch in their dens,
And lie in ambush under the covert?
Who provideth his prey for the Raven,

When his young cry unto God
And wander for lack of food?

CHAP. XXXIX. Knowest thou the time when the Rock-Goats bear?

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Hast thou marked the travailing of the roes?

Canst thou number the months which they fulfil?
And knowest thou the time when they bring forth,
When they bow them down and give birth to their young
And cast out their throes?

Their young grow big and hale in the plain,
They go forth and do not return.

Who sent out the Wild-Ass free,
And who loosed the Wanderer's bands,
Whose home I have made in the wilderness,
And in the salt waste his haunt?

He scorneth the din of the city,