faith was burning feebly and unsteadily; a little more and it seemed as if it might have utterly gone out; but at last the storm was lulling; as the charges are brought personally home to him, the confidence in his own real innocence rises against them.  He had before known that he was innocent, now he feels the strength which lies in it, as if God were beginning to reveal Himself within him, to prepare the way for the after outward manifestation of Himself.

The friends, as before, repeat one another with but little difference; the sameness being of course intentional, as showing that they were not speaking for themselves, but as representatives of a prevailing opinion.  Eliphaz, again, gives the note which the others follow.  Hear this Calvinist of the old world.  “Thy own mouth condemneth thee, and thine own lips testify against thee.  What is man that he should be clean, and he that is born of a woman that he should be righteous?  Behold, he putteth no trust in his saints.  Yea, the heavens are not clean in his sight; how much more abominable and filthy is man, which drinketh iniquity like water?” Strange, that after all these thousands of years, we should still persist in this degrading confession, as a thing which it is impious to deny, and impious to attempt to render otherwise, when scripture itself, in language so emphatic, declares that it is a lie.  Job is innocent, perfect, righteous.  God Himself bears witness to it.  It is Job who is found at last to have spoken truth, and the friends to have sinned in denying it.  And he holds fast by his innocency, and with a generous confidence puts away the misgivings which had begun to cling to him.  Among his complainings he had exclaimed, that God was remembering upon him the sins of his youth—­not denying them—­knowing well, that he, like others, had gone astray before he had learnt to control himself, but feeling that at least in an earthly father it is unjust to visit the faults of childhood on the matured man; feeling that he had long, long shaken them off from him, and they did not even impair the probity of his after life.  But now these doubts, too, pass away in the brave certainty that God is not less just than man.  As the denouncings grow louder and darker, he appeals from his narrow judges to the Supreme Tribunal, calls on God to hear him and to try his cause—­and, then, in the strength of this appeal his eye grows clearer still.  His sickness is mortal:  he has no hope in life, and death is near, but the intense feeling that justice must and will be done, holds to him closer and closer.  God may appear on earth for him; or if that be too bold a hope, and death finds him as he is—­what is death, then?  God will clear his memory in the place where he lived; his injuries will be righted over his grave; while for himself, like a sudden gleam of sunlight between clouds, a clear, bright hope beams up, that he too, then, in another life, if not in this, when his skin is wasted off his bones, and the worms have done their work on the prison of his spirit, he, too, at last may then see God; may see Him, and have his pleadings heard.