the laws upon which it depends.  But to serve God and to love Him is higher and better than happiness, though it be with wounded feet, and bleeding brow, and hearts loaded with sorrow.  Into this high faith Job is rising, treading his temptations under his feet, and finding in them a ladder on which his spirit rises.  Thus he is passing further and ever further from his friends, soaring where their imaginations cannot follow him.  To them he is a blasphemer whom they gaze at with awe and terror.  They had charged him with sinning, on the strength of their hypothesis, and he has answered with a deliberate denial of it.  Losing now all mastery over themselves, they pour out a torrent of mere extravagant invective and baseless falsehoods, which in the calmer outset they would have blushed to think of.  They know no evil of Job, but they do not hesitate now to convert conjecture into certainty, and specify in detail the particular crimes which he must have committed.  He ought to have committed them, and so he had; the old argument then as now.—­“Is not thy wickedness great?” says Eliphaz.  “Thou hast taken a pledge from thy brother for nought, and stripped the naked of their clothing; thou hast not given water to the weary, and thou hast withholden bread from the hungry;” and so on through a series of mere distracted lies.  But the time was past when words like these could make Job angry.  Bildad follows them up with an attempt to frighten him by a picture of the power of that God whom he was blaspheming; but Job cuts short his harangue, and ends it for him in a spirit of loftiness which Bildad could not have approached; and then proudly and calmly rebukes them all, no longer in scorn and irony, but in high tranquil self-possession.  “God forbid that I should justify you,” he says; “till I die I will not remove my integrity from me.  My righteousness I hold fast, and will not let it go.  My heart shall not reproach me so long as I live.”

So far all has been clear, each party, with increasing confidence, having insisted on their own position, and denounced their adversaries.  A difficulty now rises, which, at first sight, appears insurmountable.  As the chapters are at present printed, the entire of the twenty-seventh is assigned to Job, and the verses from the eleventh to the twenty-third are in direct contradiction to all which he has maintained before, are, in fact, a concession of having been wrong from the beginning.  Ewald, who, as we said above, himself refuses to allow the truth of Job’s last and highest position, supposes that he is here receding from it, and confessing what an over precipitate passion had betrayed him into denying.  For many reasons, principally because we are satisfied that Job said then no more than the real fact, we cannot think Ewald right; and the concessions are too large and too inconsistent to be reconciled even with his own general theory of the poem.  Another solution of the difficulty is very simple, although, it is