n assurance that there is something in the world which calls
lovingly to the soul, and that while we stretch out yearning hands and
desirous hearts to that, we are indeed very near to the unknown Mind of
God.

X

I have often wondered how it has come about that Job has become
proverbial for patience. I suppose that it has arisen out of the verse
in the Epistle of St. James about the patience of Job; but, like the
passage in the Book of Numbers which attributes an extreme meekness to
Moses, it seems to me to be either a very infelicitous description, or
else a case where both adjectives have shifted their meaning. Moses is
notable for an almost fiery vehemence of character, and the punishment
that was laid upon him was the outcome of a display of intemperate
wrath. Just as we associate meekness with the worm that never turns, so
the typically patient animal is the ass who is too phlegmatic to resent
the most unjust chastisement, and ready to accommodate itself to the
most overtaxing burdens. But Job is the very opposite of this; he
endures, because there is no way out; but he never for a moment
acquiesces in the justice of his affliction, and his complaints are
both specific and protracted. He does not even display any very
conspicuous fortitude under his afflictions. He is not indomitable so
much as persistent. He is rather stubbornly self-righteous. It could
not, of course, be otherwise, for the essence of the situation is that
the sufferer should be aware that his deeds do not deserve punishment,
and that the sufferings he endures should be permitted in order that
his faith in God as well as his faith in his own integrity should be
tested.

The truth is that the word patience is used in English in a double
sense; it is applied to a sort of unreasoning stupidity, which accepts
suffering and pain without adding to it by imaginative comparison; such
patience knows nothing of the pain of which Dante speaks, the pain of
contrasting present unhappiness with past delight; and similarly, it
does not suffer the pangs of anticipation, the terrors of which Lord
Beaconsfield spoke, when he said that the worst calamities in his life
were the calamities which never happened. Nine-tenths of the misery of
suffering lies in the power of forecasting its continuance and its
increase, and the lesser patience of which I have spoken is the
patience which, by no effort of reason, but by pure instinct, hears the
burden of the mom