ed. Job had sinned and he had suffered, and this wild passion
was but impenitence and rebellion.

Being as certain that they were right in this opinion as they were that
God Himself existed, that they should speak what they felt was only
natural and necessary; and their language at the outset is, all which
would be dictated by the tenderest sympathy. Eliphaz opens, the oldest
and most important of the three, in a soft, subdued, suggestive strain,
contriving in every way to spare the feelings of the sufferer, to the
extreme to which his love will allow him. All is general, impersonal,
indirect,--the rule of the world, the order of Providence. He does not
accuse Job, but he describes his calamities, and leaves him to gather
for himself the occasion which had produced them; and then passes off,
as if further to soften the blow, to the mysterious vision in which the
infirmity of mortal nature had been revealed to him, the universal
weakness which involved both the certainty that Job had shared in it,
and the excuse for him, if he would confess and humble himself: the
blessed virtue of repentance follows, and the promise that all shall be
well.

This is the note on which each of the friends strikes successively, in
the first of the three divisions into which the dialogue divides itself,
but each with increasing peremptoriness and confidence, as Job, so far
from accepting their interpretation of what had befallen him, hurls it
from him in anger and disdain. Let us observe (and the Calvinists should
consider this), he will hear as little of the charges against mankind as
of charges against himself. He will not listen to the 'corruption of
humanity,' because in the consciousness of his own innocency, he knows
that it is not corrupt: he knows that he is himself just and good, and
we know it, the Divine sentence upon him having been already passed. He
will not acknowledge his sin, for he knows not of what to repent. If he
could have reflected calmly, he might have foreseen what they would say.
He knew all that as well as they: it was the old story which he had
learnt, and could repeat, if necessary, as well as anyone: and if it had
been no more than a philosophical discussion, touching himself no more
nearly than it touched his friends, he might have allowed for the
tenacity of opinion in such matters, and listened to it and replied to
it with equanimity. But, as the proverb says, 'It is ill talking between
a full man and a fast