This is the note on which each of the friends strikes successively, in the first of the three divisions into which the dialogue divides itself, but each with increasing peremptoriness and confidence, as Job, so far from accepting their interpretation of what had befallen him, hurls it from him in anger and disdain.  Let us observe (what the Calvinists make of it they have given us no means of knowing,) he will hear as little of the charges against mankind, as of charges against himself.  He will not listen to the “corruption of humanity,” because in the consciousness of his own innocency, he knows that it is not corrupt:  he knows it, and we know it, the divine sentence upon him having been already passed.  He will not acknowledge his sin, he cannot repent, for he knows not of what to repent.  If he could have reflected calmly, he might have foreseen what they would say.  He knew all that as well as they:  it was the old story which he had learnt, and could repeat, if necessary, as well as any one:  and if it had been no more than a philosophical discussion, touching himself no more nearly than it touched his friends, he might have allowed for the tenacity of opinion in such matters, and listened to it and replied to it with equanimity.  But as the proverb says, “it is ill-talking between a full man and a fasting:”  and in him such equanimity would have been but Stoicism or the affectation of it, and unreal as the others’ theories.  Possessed with the certainty that he had not deserved what had befallen him, harassed with doubt, and worn out with pain and unkindness, he had assumed (and how natural that he should assume it), that those who loved him would not have been hasty to believe evil of him, that he had been safe in speaking to them as he really felt, and that he might look to them for something warmer and more sympathizing than such dreary eloquence.  So when the revelation comes upon him of what was passing in them, he attributes it (and now he is unjust to them) to a falsehood of heart, and not to a blindness of under-standing.  Their sermons, so kindly intended, roll past him as a dismal mockery.  They had been shocked (and how true again is this to nature) at his passionate cry for death.  “Do ye reprove words?” he says, “and the speeches of one that is desperate, which are as wind?” It was but poor friendship and narrow wisdom.  He had looked to them for pity, for comfort, and love.  He had longed for it as the parched caravans in the desert for the water-streams, and “his brethren had dealt deceitfully with him,” as the brooks, which in the cool winter roll in a full turbid stream; “what time it waxes warm they vanish, when it is hot they are consumed out of their place.  The caravans of Tema looked for them, the companies of Sheba waited for them.  They were confounded because they had hoped.  They came thither and there was nothing.”  If for once these poor men could have trusted their hearts, if for once they could have believed that