Expositor's Bible: The Book of JobWatson, Robert A. (Robert Alexander)
Religion
Expositor's Bible: The Book of Job
Watson, Robert A. (Robert Alexander)
Bible. Job -- Commentaries
Clearly Job sees the unsolved enigma of the godless man's prosperous
life, states it, and stands trembling. Regarding it what have other
thinkers said? "If the law of all creation were justice," says John
Stuart Mill, "and the Creator omnipotent, then in whatever amount
suffering and happiness might be dispensed to the world, each person's
share of them would be exactly proportioned to that person's good or
evil deeds; no human being would have a worse lot than another without
worse deserts; accident or favouritism would have no part in such a
world, but every human life would be the playing out of a drama
constructed like a perfect moral tale. No one is able to blind himself
to the fact that the world we live in is totally different from this."
Emerson, again, facing this problem, repudiates the doctrine that
judgment is not executed in this world. He affirms that there is a
fallacy in the concession that the bad are successful, that justice is
not done now. "Every ingenuous and aspiring soul," he says, "leaves the
doctrine behind him in his own experience; and all men feel sometimes
the falsehood which they cannot demonstrate." His theory is that there
is balance or compensation everywhere. "Life invests itself with
inevitable conditions, which the unwise seek to dodge, which one and
another brags that he does not know, that they do not touch him;--but
the brag is on his lips, the conditions are in his soul. If he escapes
them in one part, they attack him in another more vital part.... The
ingenuity of man has always been dedicated to the solution of one
problem,--how to detach the sensual sweet, the sensual strong, the
sensual bright, from the moral sweet, the moral deep, the moral fair;
that is, again, to contrive to cut clean off this upper surface so thin
as to leave it bottomless; to get a _one end_, without an _other
end_.... This dividing and detaching is steadily counteracted. Pleasure
is taken out of pleasant things, profit out of profitable things, power
out of strong things, so soon as we seek to separate them from the
whole. We can no more halve things and get the sensual good, by itself,
than we can get an inside that shall have no outside, or a light without
a shadow.... For everything you have missed, you have gained something
else, and for everything you gain you lose something. If the gatherer
gathers too much, nature takes out of the man what she puts into his
chest; swells the estate but kills the owner.... We feel defrauded of
the retribution due to evil acts, because the criminal adheres to his
vice and contumacy, and does not come to a crisis or judgment anywhere
in visible nature. There is no stunning confutation of his nonsense
before men and angels. Has he therefore outwitted the law? Inasmuch as
he carries the malignity and the lie with him, he so far deceases from
nature. In some manner there will be a demonstration of the wrong to the
understanding also; but, should we not see it, this deadly deduction
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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