* * * * *

An extract from the book itself, as out of print, may be acceptable, the more so that it takes a new and true view (as I apprehend) of Job and his restored prosperity:—­

“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 sympathised 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 everything 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; 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.