Why did I produce these passages at length?  For their Doric simplicity; for their plain and masculine features; for their obvious truthfulness; for their manifest probability as to fact, and expectability previously to it.  Why on earth should they be doubted in their literal sense? and were they not more likely to have happened than to have been invented?  We have no such geniuses now as this writer must have been, who by the pure force of imagination could have created that tableau.  Milton had Job to go to.  Simplicity is proof presumptive in favour of the plain inspiration of such passages:  for the plastic mind which could conceive so just a sketch, would never have rested satisfied, without having painted and adorned it picturesquely.  Such rare flights of fancy are always made the most of.

One or two thoughts respecting Job’s trial.  That he should at last give way, was only probable:  he was, in short, another Adam, and had another fall; albeit he wrestled nobly.  Worthy was he to be named among God’s chosen three, “Noah, Daniel, and Job:”  and worthy that the Lord should bless his latter end.  This word brings me to the point I wish to touch on; the great compensation which God gave to Job.

Children can never be regarded as other than individualities:  and notwithstanding Eastern feelings about increase in quantity, its quality is, after all, the question for the heart.  I mean that many children to be born, is but an inadequate return for many children dying.  If a father loses a well-beloved son, it is small recompense of that aching void that he gets another.  For this reason of the affections, and because I suppose that thinkers have sympathized with me in the difficulty, I wish to say a word about Job’s children, lost and found.  It will clear away what is to some minds a moral and affectionate objection.  Now, this is the state of the case.

The patriarch is introduced to us as possessing so many camels, and oxen, and so forth; and ten children.  All these are represented to him by witnesses, to all appearance credible, as dead; and he mourns for his great loss accordingly.  Would not a merchant feel to all intents and purposes a ruined man, if he received a clear intelligence from different parts of the world at once that all his ships and warehouses had been destroyed by hurricanes and fire?  Faith given, patience follows:  and the trial is morally the same, whether the news be true or false.  Remarkably enough, after the calamitous time is past, when the good man of Uz is discerned as rewarded by heaven for his patience by the double of every thing once lost—­his children remain the same in number, ten.  It seems to me quite possible that neither camels, &c., nor children, really had been killed.  Satan might have meant it so, and schemed it; and the singly-coming messengers believed it all, as also did the well-enduring Job.  But the scriptural word does not go to say that these things happened;