but that certain emissaries said they happened.  I think the devil missed his mark:  that the messengers were scared by some abortive diabolic efforts; and that, (with a natural increase of camels, &c., meanwhile,) the patriarch’s paternal heart was more than compensated at the last, by the restoration of his own dear children.  They were dead, and are alive again; they were lost, and are found.  Like Abraham returning from Mount Calvary with Isaac, it was the Resurrection in a figure.

If to this view objection is made, that, because the boils of Job were real, therefore, similarly real must be all his other evils; I reply, that in the one temptation, the suffering was to be mental; in the other, bodily.  In the latter case, positive, personal pain, was the gist of the matter:  in the former, the heart might be pierced, and the mind be overwhelmed, without the necessity of any such incurable affliction as children’s deaths amount to.  God’s mercy may well have allowed the evil one to overreach himself; and when the restoration came, how double was the joy of Job over those ten dear children.

Again, if any one will urge that, in the common view of the case, Job at the last really has twice as many children as before, for that he has ten old ones in heaven, and ten new ones on earth:  I must, in answer, think that explanation as unsatisfactory to us, as the verity of it would have been to Job.  Affection, human affection, is not so numerically nor vicariously consoled:  and it is, perhaps, worth while here to have thrown out (what I suppose to be) a new view of the case, if only to rescue such wealth as children from the infidel’s sneer of being confounded with such wealth as camels.  Moreover, such a paternal reward was anteriorly more probable.

JOSHUA.

How many of our superficial thinkers have been staggered at the great miracle recorded of Joshua; and how few, even of the deeper sort, comparatively, may have discerned its aptness, its science, and its anterior likelihood:  “Sun! stand thou still upon Gibeon; and thou, moon, in the valley of Ajalon.”  Now, consider, for we hope to vindicate even this stupendous event from the charge of improbability.

Baal and Ashtaroth, chief idols of the Canaanites, were names for sun and moon.  It would manifestly be the object of God and His ambassador to cast utter scorn on such idolatry.  And what could be more apt than that Joshua, commissioned to extirpate the corrupted race, should miraculously be enabled, as it were, to bind their own gods to aid in the destruction of such votaries?