And now, remembering the double action of the drama, the actual trial of Job, the result of which is uncertain, and the delusion of these men which is, at the outset, certain, let us go rapidly through the dialogue.  Satan’s share in the temptation had already been overcome.  Lying sick in the loathsome disease which had been sent upon him, his wife, in Satan’s own words, had tempted Job, to say, “Farewell to God,” think no more of God or goodness, since this was all which came of it; and Job had told her, that she spoke as one of the foolish women.  He “had received good at the hand of the Lord, and should he not receive evil?” But now, when real love and real affection appear, his heart melts in him; he loses his forced self-composure, and bursts into a passionate regret that he had ever been born.  In the agony of his sufferings, hope of better things had died away.  He does not complain of injustice; as yet, and before his friends have stung and wounded him, he makes no questioning of Providence,—­but why was life given to him at all, if only for this?  And sick in mind and sick in body, but one wish remains to him, that death will come quickly and end all.  It is a cry from the very depths of a single and simple heart.  But for such simplicity and singleness his friends could not give him credit; possessed beforehand with their idea, they see in his misery only a fatal witness against him; such calamities could not have befallen a man, the justice of God would not have permitted it, unless they had been deserved.  Job had sinned and he had suffered, and this wild passion was but impenitence and rebellion.

Being as certain that they were right in this opinion as they were that God Himself existed, that they should speak what they felt was only natural and necessary; and their language at the outset is all which would be dictated by the tenderest sympathy.  Eliphaz opens, the oldest and most important of the three, in a soft, subdued, suggestive strain, contriving in every way to spare the feelings of the sufferer, to the extreme, to which his real love will allow him.  All is general, impersonal, indirect, the rule of the world, the order of Providence.  He does not accuse Job, but he describes his calamities, and leaves him to gather for himself the occasion which had produced them, and then passes off, as if further to soften the blow, to the mysterious vision in which the infirmity of mortal nature had been revealed to him, the universal weakness which involved both the certainty that Job had shared in it, and the excuse for him, if he would confess and humble himself:  the blessed virtue of repentance follows, and the promise that all shall be well.