29

An Israelite here and there, no doubt, might have extended to every individual member of the entire commonwealth, those promises and threatenings which belong to it as a whole, and be firmly persuaded that whosoever should be pious must also be happy, and that whoever was unhappy must be bearing the penalty of his wrong-doing, which penalty would forthwith change itself into blessing, as soon as he abandoned his sin.  Such a one appears to have written Job, for the plan of it is entirely in this spirit.

30

But daily experience could not possibly be permitted to confirm this belief, or else it would have been all over, for ever, with people who had this experience, so far as all recognition and reception was concerned of the truth as yet unfamiliar to them.  For if the pious were absolutely happy, and it also of course was a necessary part of his happiness that his satisfaction should be broken by no uneasy thoughts of death, and that he should die old, and satisfied with life to the full:  how could he yearn after another life? and how could he reflect upon a thing after which he did not yearn?  But if the pious did not reflect thereupon, who then should reflect?  The transgressor? he who felt the punishments of his misdeeds, and if he cursed this life, must have so gladly renounced that other existence?

31

Much less would it signify if an Israelite here and there directly and expressly denied the immortality of the soul and future recompense, on account of the law having no reference thereto.  The denial of an individual, had it even been a Solomon, did not arrest the progress of the general reason, and was even in itself a proof that the nation had now come a great step nearer the truth For individuals only deny what the many are bringing into consideration; and to bring into consideration that, concerning which no one troubled himself at all before, is half way to knowledge.

32

Let us also acknowledge that it is a heroic obedience to obey the laws of God simply because they are God’s laws, and not because He has promised to reward the obedience to them here and there; to obey them even though there be an entire despair of future recompense, and uncertainty respecting a temporal one.

33

Must not a people educated in this heroic obedience towards God have been destined, must they not have been capable beyond all others of executing Divine purpose? of quite a special character?  Let the soldier, who pays blind obedience to his leader, become also convinced of his leader’s wisdom, and then say what that leader may not undertake to achieve with him.

34

As yet the Jewish people had reverenced in their Jehovah rather the mightiest than the wisest of all Gods; as yet they had rather feared Him as a Jealous God than loved Him:  a proof this too, that the conception which they had of their eternal One God was not exactly the right conception which we should have of God.  However, now the time was come that these conceptions of theirs were to be expanded, ennobled, rectified, to accomplish which God availed Himself of a quite natural means, a better and more correct measure, by which it got the opportunity of appreciating Him.