One act of justice remains.  Knowing as we do, the cause of Job’s sufferings, and that as soon as his trial was over, it was no longer operative, our sense of fitness could not be satisfied unless he were indemnified outwardly for his outward sufferings.  Satan is defeated, and his integrity proved; and there is no reason why the general law should be interfered with, which makes good men happy; or why obvious calamities, obviously undeserved, should remain any more unremoved.  Perhaps, too, a deeper lesson still lies below his restoration —­something perhaps of this kind.  Prosperity, enjoyment, happiness, comfort, peace, whatever be the name by which we designate that state in which life is to our own selves pleasant and delightful, as long as they are sought or prized as things essential, so far have a tendency to disennoble our nature, and are a sign that we are still in servitude and selfishness.  Only when they lie outside us, as ornaments merely to be worn or laid aside as God pleases, only then may such things be possessed with impunity.  Job’s heart in early times had clung to them more than he knew, but now he was purged clean, and they were restored because he had ceased to need them.

Such in outline is this wonderful poem.  With the material of which it is woven we have not here been concerned, although it is so rich and pregnant, that we might with little difficulty construct out of it a complete picture of the world as then it was:  its life, knowledge, arts, habits, superstitions, hopes, and fears.  The subject is the problem of all mankind, and the composition embraces no less wide a range.  But what we are here most interested upon, is the epoch which it marks in the progress of mankind, as the first recorded struggle of a new experience with an established orthodox belief.  True, for hundreds of years, perhaps for a thousand, the superstition against which it was directed continued; when Christ came it was still in its vitality.  Nay, as we saw, it is alive, or in a sort of mock life, among us at this very day.  But even those who retained their imperfect belief had received into their canon a book which treated it with contumely and scorn, so irresistible was the lofty majesty of truth.

In days like these, when we hear so much of progress, it is worth while to ask ourselves, what advances we have made further in the same direction? and once more, at the risk of some repetition, let us look at the position in which this book leaves us.  It had been assumed, that man if he lived a just and upright life, had a right to expect to be happy.  Happiness, “his being’s end and aim,” was his legitimate and covenanted reward.  If God therefore was just, such a man would be happy; and inasmuch as God was just, the man who was not happy had not deserved to be.  There is no flaw in this argument; and if it is unsound, the fallacy can only lie in the supposed right to happiness.  It is idle to talk of inward consolations.  Job felt them, but they were not everything.  They did not relieve the anguish of his wounds; they did not make the loss of his children, or his friends’ unkindness, any the less painful to him.