With such a hope, or even the shadow of one, he turns back to the world again to look at it.  Facts against which he had before closed his eyes he allows and confronts, and he sees that his own little experience is but the reflection of a law.  You tell me, he seems to say, that the good are rewarded, and that the wicked are punished, that God is just, and that this is always so.  Perhaps it is, or will be, but not in the way which you imagine.  You have known me, you have known what my life has been; you see what I am, and it is no difficulty to you.  You prefer believing that I, whom you call your friend, am a deceiver or a pretender, to admitting the possibility of the falsehood of your hypothesis.  You will not listen to my assurance, and you are angry with me because I will not lie against my own soul, and acknowledge sins which I have not committed.  You appeal to the course of the world in proof of your faith, and challenge me to answer you.  Well, then, I accept your challenge.  The world is not what you say.  You have told me what you have seen of it.  I will tell you what I have seen.

“Even while I remember I am afraid, and trembling taketh hold upon my flesh.  Wherefore do the wicked become old, yea, and are mighty in power.  Their seed is established in their sight with them, and their offspring before their eyes.  Their houses are safe from fear, neither is the rod of God upon them.  Their bull gendereth and faileth not; their cow calveth and casteth not her calf.  They send forth their little ones like a flock, and their children dance.  They take the timbrel and harp, and rejoice at the sound of the organ.  They spend their days in wealth, and in a moment go down into the grave.  Therefore they say unto God, Depart from us, for we desire not the knowledge of thy ways.  What is the Almighty that we should serve him? and what profit should we have if we pray to him?”

Will you quote the weary proverb?  Will you say that “God layeth up his iniquity for his children?” (our translators have wholly lost the sense of this passage, and endeavour to make Job acknowledge what he is steadfastly denying).  Well, and what then?  What will he care?  “Will his own eye see his own fall?  Will he drink the wrath of the Almighty?  What are the fortunes of his house to him if the number of his own months is fulfilled?” One man is good and another wicked, one is happy and another is miserable.  In the great indifference of nature they share alike in the common lot.  “They lie down alike in the dust, and the worms cover them.”  Ewald, and many other critics, suppose that Job was hurried away by his feelings to say all this; and that in his calmer moments he must have felt that it was untrue.  It is a point on which we must decline accepting even Ewald’s high authority.  Even then in those old times it was beginning to be terribly true.  Even then the current theory was obliged to bend to large exceptions; and what Job saw as exceptions we see round us everywhere.