THE SPEECHES OF JEHOVAH

"Gird up now thy loins like a man," is the peremptory call of Jehovah when He "answers Job out of the whirlwind." It is an echo of the demand which the author must have made upon himself as he approached the climax of his splendid work. He sets his nerves at a strain for the tremendous task which lay before him in fitting speeches to the character of Jehovah. Upon it he brought all his mighty powers to bear. He gave free wing to his imagination while calling to his aid all the knowledge of all his world. The result is worthy, of his ambitions, his consecration, and his toil. In this noble book there is nothing nobler, in this work of genius there is nothing more sublime, than the speeches of Jehovah.

Quotation is difficult because of the wealth of the whole. Where all is pure gold one hesitates which nugget to pick up. But the music of some of the lines will never pass out of human speech. Phrases from this part of Job are in our hymns, our prayers, our sermons, and they will be treasured in the liturgy of the Church of God for ever. The day will never dawn in which we cease to ascribe praises to the Almighty and Everlasting God who "laid the foundations of the earth" and the corner-stone thereof —

"When the morning stars sang together,

And all the sons of God shouted for joy";

who alone is able to

"Bind the cluster of the Pleiades

Or loose the bands of Orion";

and say to the advancing sea,

"Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further;

And here shall thy proud wares be stayed."

Truly, the author of this divine drama has "girded up his loins like a man," and given to the world pictures and phrases which the world will never let die!

The "Answer" of Jehovah.

"Then Jehovah answered Job out of the whirlwind, and said" —. What did He say? "Moreover, Jehovah answered Job, and said" — Twice the formula appears; but what did He say?

Nothing, absolutely nothing, nothing that touches the point of Job's complainings, nothing that meets his demands, nothing that is ad rem. He appears, as Job had wished Him to appear, as the Creator and Ruler of the universe, clothed upon with its glories, its terrors, and its mysteries. He comes to answer Job's reverently irreverent challenges and silence objections which the heart of the man had flung out against the course and constitution of His world. And He says — nothing! He asserts what has not been denied and proves what nobody has called in question. And Job is satisfied! For Job answered Jehovah and said:

"Therefore have I uttered that which I understood not,

Things too wonderful for me which I knew not . . .

Wherefore I repudiate my words1

And repent in dust and ashes."

Herein lies no mystery. The genius of our author has not betrayed him. His method is true to the facts of human experience. The revelation of God is made to the heart, not to the brain: His spirit operates within the sphere of the emotions, and only afterwards and by way of reflex action in the region of the intellect. With the heart man belie veth unto righteousness.

Illustrations of the working of this law in contemporary life and literature are innumerable. It holds good even of those processes by which some storm-tossed soul finds peace when one would hesitate to ascribe the result to the leadings of God's spirit! Hundreds of men — the keenest intellects of the nineteenth century — tried in one way or another to analyse John Henry Newman's Apologia pro vita sua. None succeeds in doing it. To this day nobody can say why Newman left the Anglican Church for the Roman — unless, of course, one is ready to give an explanation which Newman would have scorned. One follows with the keenest delight, with intellectual joy and spiritual zest, the carefully written account of his thoughts and feelings through many years. But when the crucial hour dawns and one supposes that he is now to see "the moving why" Newman made the change and how the change satisfied his soul, one is led up to a blank wall and left staring at it. For all the explanation given the Apologia might as well have remained unwritten. It would have served to say: "Then I decided to enter the Roman Communion." If Newman was an inscrutable enigma to Charles Kingsley before the Apologia saw the light of day, he must have been something more puzzling still after it appeared 1 And one of the really memorable things in the fruitful annals of the Oxford Movement and its consequences is the fact that Gladstone, after his close and intimate friendship with Manning, should at last shake his head and say in bewilderment: "Manning was not straight!" "Straight"

we may gladly concede such conduct essentially is; clear it certainly is not

A more helpful illustration is found nearer to hand. Some years ago an English journalist, possessed of a taking, slap-dash newspaper style, and having a large following amongst earnest, true-hearted, but uneducated young men and women, galvanised into a show of life the old Bradlaugh-Ingersoll materialism which had been practically lost sight of on both sides of the Atlantic before the death of those two men. There was one good result. A host of Christian controversialists were quickly in the field, and these assaults upon faith were repelled with a vigour and effectiveness which flung into bold relief the feebleness and folly of the atheistic propaganda. Amongst the replies was a volume entitled Religious Doubts of the Democracy. The writers, fifteen in number, included Mr. Chesterton, Mr. George W. E. Russell, and Dr. Fry. Three of the writers gave an account of their own doubts and conquest of doubt. They told how they had lost faith and how they fought their way back to it. Two were working men, one a trained thinker, the headmaster of a public school. Their stories are admirably told — only, one is little wiser when he has read them 1 The precise thing which for each one laid doubt low and brought back the soul to God is still to seek. Each one is satisfied, as Job is satisfied, not because God has supplied the ground of intellectual assent to dogma, but because He has revealed Himself to the waiting heart. He has "answered" out of the whirlwind.

The Value of Christian Evidences.

So understood, and so interpreted, this section of Job raises for us the question of the value of that form of apologetic known as "Christian evidences."

Every apologetic is relative, relative to the individual to whom it is addressed, to his temperament, his training, the stage of development he has reached, and the mood in which it finds him. When the preacher is asked for "evidences of Christianity," it would be a perfectly proper thing for him to ask, "What sort of evidence do you want?" For it is as important to know the sort of evidence the inquirer wants as to know the sort he needs. Yet in the long run it will be found that the value of "evidences" is slight. They rarely produce fruits of holiness. Superior to the reasonings and conclusions of all logic are the deliverances of our human affection. We love, but we can with difficulty say why we love. To this day the lover finds no newer answer to the familiar question, "Why do you love me?" than the time-honoured formula, "Because you are you!" And the one way which God has provided for the discovery of Himself is that of a powerful emotional yearning toward goodness. If a man willeth to do His will, he shall know of the teaching.2

Nevertheless, good work may be done by the Christian apologist who can show the objector that his objections are not final. The doubter may be made to feel that his objections carry him too far; that they may be urged with equal strength against the things of which he is most deeply persuaded; and that if he will follow where they lead he may end in denying everything. This is the Butler method in the famous Analogy. Hugh Price Hughes was in the habit of saying that the Analogy had never "saved a soul" since it was written. In his sense of the phrase, it was not intended to "save a soul." It said to men of a certain day who professed a certain half-religious theory of the universe, "You decline to accept Christianity because of specific objections; yet those objections can be urged with precisely the same force against the philosophy you hold and defend. This is not reasonable." The principle is sound, and the application of it is dangerous only because the person who has taken refuge in a half-faith may be driven to say, "True! and I will abandon the remnant of faith to which I was clinging!" Gladstone, whose admiration for Bishop Butler knew no bounds, used the method in homely fashion to far better purpose than his great teacher did. For he insisted that such objections as were urged against Christianity could be urged against things which no human being can give up — and live! His argument is unanswerable: —

"For Doubt I have a sincere respect, but Doubt and Scepticism are different things. I contend that the sceptic is of all men on earth the most inconsistent and irrational. He uses a plea against religion which he never uses against anything he wants to do or any idea he wants to embrace — viz., the want of demonstrative evidence. Every day and all day long he is acting on evidence not demonstrative: he eats the dish he likes without certainty that it is not poisoned; he rides the horse he likes without certainty that the animal will not break his neck; he sends out of the house a servant he suspects without demonstration of guilt; he marries the woman he likes with no absolute knowledge that she loves him; he embraces the political opinion that he likes, perhaps without any study at all, certainly without demonstrative evidence of its truth. But when he comes to religion he is seized with a great intellectual scrupulosity, and demands as a pre-condition of homage to God what everywhere else he dispenses with, and then ends with thinking himself more rational than other people."3

The Soul Subdued by Vastness.

So Job is silenced before he is satisfied. And he is silenced by a vision of the vastness of the universe. Before his eyes the limitless panorama of nature is unrolled, and as his gaze reaches from wonder to wonder and from glory to glory his confidence in his own right or power to "contend" with the Most High weakens within him. Jehovah "answers" him out of the whirlwind, answers with questions, with demands, with merciless, dominating inquiries which strip him of the last vestige of "superiority" in which he had clothed himself as with a garment, and leave him silent and ashamed:

"Hast thou commanded the morning since thy days began,

And caused the dayspring to know its place?

          •          •          •          •          •          •

Hast thou entered into the springs of the sea?

Or hast thou walked in the recesses of the deep?

Have the gates of death been revealed unto thee?

          •          •          •          •          •          •

Where is the way to the dwelling of light?

And as for darkness, where is the place thereof?

          •          •          •          •          •          •

Doubtless thou knowest, for thou wast then born,

And the number of thy days is great!"

The irony is terrible. Is it deserved? At least, it does its work. Job is overwhelmed by the universe. These things belong only unto God:

"I know that thou canst do all things,

And that no purpose of thine can be restrained."

He repeats Jehovah's question,

"Who is this that hideth counsel without knowledge?"

And the guilty one stands self-confessed: it is himself!

An English poet translates the wonder and the awe of Job into the terms of modern science. Astronomy has made more vast the vastness which overwhelmed and silenced Job. To the devout soul it has made "doubt" still more untenable.

"And thro' all the clear spaces above— oh wonder! oh glory of Light! —

Came forth myriads on myriads of worlds, the shining host of the night, —

 

The vast forces and fires that know the same sun and centre as we;

The faint planets which roll in vast orbits round suns we shall never see;

 

The rays which had sped from the first, with the awful swiftness of light,

To reach only then, it might be, the confines of mortal sight:

 

Oh, wonder of Cosmical Order! oh, Maker and Ruler of all,

Before whose Infinite greatness in silence we worship and fall!

 

Could I doubt that the Will which keeps this great Universe steadfast and sure

Might be less than His creatures thought, full of goodness, pitiful, pure?

 

Could I dream that the Power which keep* those great suns circling round,

Took no thought for the humblest life which flutters and falls to the ground?"

And the conclusion is the last word of wisdom as it is the first of religion,

"Oh, Faith! thou art higher than all."4

The Epilogue.

The epilogue, it has already been pointed out, "adds nothing to the grandeur of the poem." It adds nothing to our understanding of life's mysteries and nothing to the faith that soars above them. It is a part of the "machinery" of the drama. For the purpose of his drama, by way of bringing his characters upon the stage, our author exposed Job to calamities and sorrows. The purpose accomplished, the case tried and verdict rendered, poetic justice demands that Job should be restored to his former estate of prosperity and recompensed for his losses. It is done with oriental completeness and lavishness. Job lives a hundred and forty years longer, lives in the smiles of fortune, and at last, full of years and honour, comes to his grave, as Eliphaz hoped he might,

"Like m a shock of grain cometh in in its season."

But it would have been better for us if Job had never been born of the brain of one of earth's noblest thinkers than for us to think that this, in the end, is to be the reward of righteousness. Let us believe this and act upon our belief and then the Satan's question may justly be addressed to us: Do we serve God for nought? Bread was never the reward of virtue. Houses and land, wealth in mounded heaps, and the delights of the children of men are not the recompense of faith and hope and love. The great man of letters whose study of Job remains, when all is said and done, the most searching and suggestive and satisfying in the literature of two continents, asks us to fling scorn upon so base and debasing a view of man's relations with the Infinite. And as these expositions opened with his characterisation of the divine drama, they may well close with his characterisation of religion: —

"If Christianity had never borne itself more loftily than this, do we suppose that those fierce Norsemen who had learnt, in the fiery war-songs of the Edda, of what stuff the hearts of heroes are composed, would have fashioned their sword-hilts into crosses and themselves into a crusading chivalry? Let us not dishonour our great fathers with the dream of it. The Christians, like the Stoics and the Epicureans, would have lived their little day among the ignoble sects of an effete civilisation, and would have passed off and been heard of no more. It was in another spirit that those first preachers of righteousness went out upon their warfare with evil. They preached, not enlightened prudence, but purity, justice, goodness; holding out no promises in this world except of suffering as their great Master had suffered, and rejoicing that they were counted worthy to suffer for His sake. And that crown of glory which they did believe to await them in a life beyond the grave, was no enjoyment of what they had surrendered in life, was not enjoyment at all in any sense which human thought or language can attach to the words, . . . it was to be with Christ — to lose themselves in Him."5

These words are true and righteous altogether. In the truth of them our souls abide. From the reading of this heroic poem we shall rise in heroic mood if it has bred in us the confidence that the "reward" of Christianity is — Christ.

1 Job xlii. 6, "repudiate" or "retract" my words, not "abhor myself."

2 John vii. 17.

3 Gladstone's Letters on Church and Religion (edited by D. C. Lathbury), vol. ii. pp. 77-78.

4 Lewis Morris, Evensong.

5 Froude, Short Studies on Great Subjects: The Book of Job.