with an interested piety, and of being
obedient because it was his policy. "Job does not
serve God for nought," he says; "strip him of his
splendour, and see if he will care for God then.
Humble him into poverty and wretchedness, so only
we shall know what is in his heart." The cause thus
introduced is itself a rebuke to the belief which, with
its "rewards and punishments," immediately fostered
selfishness; and the poem opens with a double action,
on one side to try the question whether it is possible for
man to love God disinterestedly--the issue of which
trial is not foreseen or even foretold, and we watch the
progress of it with an anxious and fearful interest--on
the other side, to bring out in contrast to the truth
which we already know, the cruel falsehood of the
popular faith, to show how, instead of leading men to
mercy and affection, it hardens their heart, narrows their
sympathies, and enhances the trials of the sufferer, by
refinements which even Satan had not anticipated. The
combination of evils, as blow falls on blow, suddenly,
swiftly, and terribly, has all the appearance of a purposed
visitation (as indeed it was;) if ever outward incidents
might with justice be interpreted as the immediate
action of Providence, those which fell on Job might be
so interpreted. The world turns disdainfully from the
fallen in the world's way; but far worse than this, his
chosen friends, wise, good, pious men, as wisdom and
piety were then, without one glimpse of the true cause
of his sufferings, see in them a judgment upon his secret
sins. He becomes to them an illustration, and even
(such are the paralogisms of men of this description) a
proof of their theory "that the prosperity of the wicked
is but for a while;" and instead of the comfort and help
which they might have brought him, and which in the
end they were made to bring him, he is to them no
more than a text for the enunciation of solemn falsehood.
And even worse again, the sufferer himself had been
educated in the same creed; he, too, had been taught
to see the hand of God in the outward dispensation;
and feeling from the bottom of his heart, that he, in
his own case, was a sure contradiction of what he had
learnt to believe, he himself finds his very faith in God
shaken from its foundation. The worst evils which
Satan had devised were distanced far by those which
had been created by human folly.

The creed in which Job had believed was tried and
found