e for a man (and this certainly is the practical notion of
happiness), he is the happiest of men. Nor are those idle phrases any
truer, that the good man's goodness is a never-ceasing sunshine; that
virtue is its own reward, &c. &c. If men truly virtuous care to be
rewarded for it, their virtue is but a poor investment of their moral
capital. Was Job so happy then on that ash-heap of his, the mark of the
world's scorn, and the butt for the spiritual archery of the theologian,
alone in his forlorn nakedness, like some old dreary stump which the
lightning has scathed, rotting away in the wind and the rain? If
happiness be indeed what we men are sent into this world to seek for,
those hitherto thought the noblest among us were the pitifullest and
wretchedest. Surely it was no error in Job. It was that real insight
which once was given to all the world in Christianity, however we have
forgotten it now. Job was learning to see that it was not in the
possession of enjoyment, no, nor of happiness itself, that the
difference lies between the good and the bad. True, it might be that God
sometimes, even generally, gives such happiness--gives it in what
Aristotle calls an [Greek: epigignomenon telos], but it is no part of
the terms on which He admits us to His service, still less is it the end
which we may propose to ourselves on entering His service. Happiness He
gives to whom He will, or leaves to the angel of nature to distribute
among those who fulfil the laws upon which _it_ depends. But to serve
God and to love Him is higher and better than happiness, though it be
with wounded feet, and bleeding brows, and hearts loaded with sorrow.

Into this high faith Job is rising, treading his temptations under his
feet, and finding in them a ladder on which his spirit rises. Thus he is
passing further and even further from his friends, soaring where their
imaginations cannot follow him. To them he is a blasphemer whom they
gaze at with awe and terror. They had charged him with sinning on the
strength of their hypothesis, and he has answered with a deliberate
denial of it. Losing now all mastery over themselves, they pour out a
torrent of mere extravagant invective and baseless falsehood, which in
the calmer outset they would have blushed to think of. They _know_ no
evil of Job, but they do not hesitate to convert conjecture into
certainty, and specify in detail the particular crimes which he must
have committed. He _ought_ to have commi