,--a fresh, glad pleasure in the whole spectacle of
creation, from sun and stars, sea and mountains, to the goats among the
hills, and the conies of the rock. There is frank satisfaction in the
bread which strengtheneth man's heart and the wine that makes him glad.
And all this free human joy in the activities and splendors of nature
never so much as approaches the perilous slope towards sensuality. It is
everywhere sublimated by the all-pervading recognition of a holy and
beneficent God.

What may be said of the Psalms generally is this: they express the most
vivid and various play of human emotions,--sorrow, wrath, repentance,
joy, dread, hope,--always exercised as in the presence of an Almighty
being, holy, righteous, and the friend of righteous men. In this is
their abiding power,--this close reflection of the fluctuations in every
sensitive heart under the play of life's experiences,--encompassed with
an atmosphere of noble seriousness, and outreaching toward a higher Power.

In the story of the Jewish mind, the book of Job stands by itself. It is
not so much a stage in the progressive development of a faith, as a
powerful and unanswered challenge to the current assertions of that
faith. The characteristic idea of Judaism was that God rules the world
in the interest of the good man. Not so, says Job, the facts are against
it. Hear the complaint of a good man to whom life has brought trouble
and sorrow, without remedy and without hope! So stood first the bold
arraignment, the earliest voice of truly religious skepticism. Job is
skeptical, not from any want of goodness,--he has been strenuously good;
even now in all his darkness, "my righteousness I hold fast and will not
let it go: my heart shall not reproach me so long as I live." His
goodness is of no narrow sort; justice, protection of the oppressed, help
to the suffering, these have been his delight; from wantonness of sense
he has kept himself pure; not even against wrong-doers and enemies has
his hate gone out; he has not "rejoiced at the destruction of them that
hated me, or lifted up myself when evil found him; neither have I
suffered my mouth to sin by wishing a curse to his soul." Yet, after a
life of this sort, he finds himself bereft, impoverished, tormented.
Where is the righteousness of God? He turns to his friends for sympathy.
"Have pity upon me, have pity upon me, O ye my friends; for the hand of
God hath touched me." His friends for