“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 the 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 these 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.”

CHAPTER XV.

THE CROCK OF GOLD, ETC.

The origin of the “Crock of Gold” is so well given in a preface, written by Mr. Butler of Philadelphia, for his American edition of my works in 1851, that I choose here to reproduce it, as below.  Our cousins over the water were characteristically very fond of the “Crock of Gold,” and some editions of “Proverbial Philosophy” were published by them as “by the author of the ‘Crock of Gold’” on the title-page, whereof I have a copy.  Moreover, it was dramatised and acted at “the Boston Museum, Tremont Street”—­a playbill which I have announcing the twenty-first representation, November 1, 1845; the writer sent it to me in MS., where it lies among the chaos of my papers.  In England it has been issued five times in various forms, and a printed play thereof as adapted by Fitzball, who wrote for Astley’s and the like, was acted (without my leave asked or granted) in November 1847, at the City of London Theatre in the East End:  I did not stop it, as on a certain private scrutiny I saw that the influence of the play upon its crowded audiences seemed a good one.  Unseen and unknown in a private box I noted the touching effect of Grace’s Psalm (ch. viii.) and the sobs and tears all over the theatre that accompanied it; so it was a wisdom not to interfere with such wholesome popularity and wholesale good-doing.  It was a fair method of preaching the Gospel to the poor, for that crowd was of the humblest.

The “Crock of Gold” has been translated complete as a feuilleton both in French and German by newspapers; and I have copies somewhere,—­but I know not who wrote the French, the German authoress having been the Fraulein Von Lagerstroem.