self in life, and extended the range of his benefits as far as possible. He is not going to under-rate his claims; he is not going to admit for one single moment that he has been a sinner. And here opens for us the real value of the Book of Job. We have called it both ancient and modern. It is modern because it deals with a problem which is just as alive for us as it ever was in the centuries before the Christian era. It is ancient because it is full of the persistent ideas and equally persistent prejudices of the Jewish mind. The earliest religious view is undoubtedly that if God is a just Judge, He will bring a man's fortunes into more or less correspondence with his goodness of character. If he is good, he will flourish; if he is evil, he will be cut down. The Psalms are full of this idea; and, indeed, the whole signification of the priestly revision of the historical books proceeds on the assumption that Israel was punished because Israel had sinned. Such a crude and primitive idea, which unfortunately is very largely prevalent among other faiths than the Hebrew, breaks down in contact with actual experience. If the Almighty sends His rain upon desert places quite as much as on fruitful lands, it is also plain that He showers His benefits equally on the just and on the unjust. Or, in other words, men of common-sense and practical wisdom can build up a great amount of external prosperity for themselves, whether they are moral or no, for the simple reason that the conditions of success are wholly independent of ethical considerations. The teaching of Christ took a broader view, as is proved by His remark in reference to those on whom the Tower of Siloam fell. They were not, He declares, sinners beyond all other men because they had suffered such things. But the strange and interesting thing is that the Book of Job teaches the same lesson. Here is Job, a pattern man, a devout worshipper, a just ruler, a kindly master and friend. He loses all his property, and is himself afflicted with a horrible malady. His friends come and tell him that he richly deserved everything he had got, and Job answers with increasing irritation that they are miserable counsellors, because their judgment is false. If he suffered more than

other men, it was not because he was wickeder than other men. Then comes the intervention of Elihu, which, at all events, suggests here and there the deep truth which the old Greek dramatists had discovered, that suffering has an educative power, that it is not purposeless, that it does not belong to an irrational universe, but has some far-off, dimlydiscerned, divine end. But when Jehovah comes on the scene, He makes no answer at all to Job's questions. On the contrary, He asks questions Himself. Who is Job that he dares to interrogate his Maker? God is inscrutable, and His ways past finding out. And so the book ends on a lesson of modesty-something like the moral of Isaiah, that the potter works as he will, and that the thing he moulds is no critic of his designs.

But if the problem of the Book of Job is the question which has beset men in all ages, modern as well as ancient -the question how to explain the existence of evil-the treatment of it is distinctly tinged with Jewish modes of thought. In the first place, modern ages have taught us to magnify the importance of the individual. But the attitude of the Hebrew writer is that the individual is of absolutely no consequence whatsoever. The Almighty uses the things He has made in whatever fashion pleases Him. Men can be turned into instruments of wrath, as well as agents of safety and health. A great deal of modern speculation indignantly refuses to accept such a point of view. It believes (which certainly the writer of the Book of Job did not believe) that man has a perfect right to ask the why and the wherefore of his brief and perturbed existence. But there is also another and a deeper reason why the Book of Job is formed on a pattern which does not appeal to some thinkers. It is called a philosophical work; but it does not believe in knowledge as an end in itself. It distinctly says that metaphysical speculation cannot arrive at any definite conclusions. The real knowledge is "Wisdom," as the Jews understood the term; that is to say, the performance of duty, the revelation that, whatever may or may not be true with regard to the ultimate elements and secrets of life, there is a certain piece

of work which man is ordained to accomplish, and which he must execute according to the best of his ability.

Indeed, one of the most curious features in the history of the Jew is his steady and earnest repudiation of the Greek culture. "Cursed is the man who allows his son to learn Grecian wisdom," says the Talmud. Or, as it is put by a Jewish poet, "Go not near the Grecian wisdom: it has no fruit, but only blossoms." The second quotation reveals the real source of the objection which the Hebrews felt to Hellenic culture. It had no immediate operative influence on life; it did not teach the science of conduct, because the intellect to which it trusted is a powerful instrument with many effects, but none of them necessarily of an ethical kind. It is curious to discover that many definite attempts were made at a certain period of history to subject the Jew to Hellenistic influences, but they were uniformly unsuccessful. Those who are interested in the point can peruse the first chapter of Mr. G. F. Abbott's valuable work, Israel in Europe, in which this particular contrast between Hebraism and Hellenism occupies the author's attention.1 In 198 B.C. Palestine passed under the sway of the Greco-Syrian Seleucids, who began a policy of forcible assimilation, the worst of all policies to adopt with the Jew. The Egyptian monarchs were tolerant, the Syrian kings were violent, but neither succeeded in reconciling the Hebrew to the ways of the Gentile. The splendid heroism of the Maccabees was only one indication of the stubborn resistance offered to Hellenizing influences. Often the Court party temporized with the Hellenistic movement. The Sadducees represented a party who among the Jews themselves adopted liberal modes of thought. But they had no chance with the more genuine elements among the Hebrews. The Pharisees would have nothing to do with Hellenic culture, still less, of course, the Essenes; and the anti-Greek section of the people, who were termed the "Pious" (Chassidim or Assideans), regarded, as Mr. Abbott says, with the deepest misgiving the inroad of all foreign customs, whether of life or of thought.

1 Israel in Europe, by G. F. Abbott (Macmillan, 1907).

The conclusion of the Book of Job, which some have found so unsatisfactory, is really to be explained by considerations dependent on this broad contrast between Jew and Greek. When at last Job obtains his wish, and has the opportunity of pleading his cause before God, he has not a word to say. He had before been perfectly convinced of the justice of his own position, and more than a little troubled as to the apparent injustice of the Divine Providence. Although he, no more than any of the other Hebrews of the time, had anything but the vaguest idea of a life after death, yet he strenuously believed that there would arise some avenger after him, some one to put his cause aright. But God answers Job out of the whirlwind, and Job is reduced to silence. The theophany is so overwhelming that an individual cause is wholly obliterated by its splendour. But if we ask how the theophany explains the problem, the answer is certainly not wholly clear. For there is no solution of the given problem. There is only the repeated assertion that God is the author of a wonderful universe, in which the rights of the individual sink to insignificance. That is the true attitude of the Jewish mind, and is valuable for this very reason. Job is told to look

at the larger scheme of the universe. Every man in grief is naturally inclined to over-rate the importance of his own personality. "There is no suffering like my suffering," he is apt to say; "there is no such salient instance of the injustice of the world." How can such a selfish attitude be cured? Only, the Book of Job would seem to suggest, by raising one's eyes to the hills, by thinking of the bigger things, by trying to understand an universal scheme in which the individual plays his part indeed, but a wholly subordinate and, perhaps, ineffective part. In some such fashion we may interpret to ourselves the magnificent rhetoric with which this ancient piece of literature concludes, remembering at the same time that there is a hint throughout that the sufferings of Job are in no sense final, but only designed as a test of his integrity. Moreover, the substantial rectitude of his life is vindicated at the close. His friends are reproved and punished for their narrow views the ordinary narrow view which links suffer

ing to sin as effect to cause-while the hero himself is restored to all his former prosperity. As we saw before in the case of Ecclesiastes, so we see still more plainly here, that it is the faith of the Hebrew which is the one over-mastering element in his character, the great spiritual force by means of which he conquers the world.