me experience shows also what a marvellous power
is in us of thrusting aside phenomena which interfere with our cherished
convictions; and when such convictions are consecrated into a creed
which it is a sacred duty to believe, experience is but like water
dropping upon a rock, which wears it away, indeed, at last, but only in
thousands of years. This theory was and is the central idea of the
Jewish polity, the obstinate toughness of which has been the perplexity
of Gentiles and Christians from the first dawn of its existence; it
lingers among ourselves in our Liturgy and in the popular belief; and in
spite of the emphatic censure of Him after whose name we call ourselves,
is still the instant interpreter for us of any unusual calamity, a
potato blight, a famine, or an epidemic: such vitality is there in a
moral faith, though now, at any rate, contradicted by the experience of
all mankind, and at issue even with Christianity itself.

At what period in the world's history misgivings about it began to show
themselves it is now impossible to say; it was at the close, probably,
of the patriarchal period, when men who really _thought_ must have found
the ground palpably shaking under them. Indications of such misgivings
are to be found in the Psalms, those especially passing under the name
of Asaph; and all through Ecclesiastes there breathes a spirit of
deepest and saddest scepticism. But Asaph thrusts his doubts aside, and
forces himself back into his old position; and the scepticism of
Ecclesiastes is confessedly that of a man who had gone wandering after
enjoyment; searching after pleasures--pleasures of sense and pleasures
of intellect--and who, at last, bears reluctant testimony that, by such
methods, no pleasures can be found which will endure; that he had
squandered the power which might have been used for better things, and
had only strength remaining to tell his own sad tale as a warning to
mankind. There is nothing in Ecclesiastes like the misgivings of a noble
nature. The writer's own personal happiness had been all for which he
had cared; he had failed, as all men gifted as he was gifted are sure to
fail, and the lights of heaven were extinguished by the disappointment
with which his own spirit had been clouded.

Utterly different from these, both in character and in the lesson which
it teaches, is the Book of Job. Of unknown date, as we said, and unknown
authorship, the language impregnated with strange idioms