"Lo, mine eye," says Job, (xiii, 1,) "_hath seen all this, mine ear hath heard_ and understood it. What ye know, the same do I know also." We have all seen it, says Job, and now you would come here with your platitudes about God sending all this to punish the wicked: {p. 296} "4. But ye are forgers of lies, ye are all physicians of no value." Honest Job is disgusted, and denounces his counselors with Carlylean vigor: "11. Shall not his excellency make you afraid? _and his dread fall upon you?_ "12. Your remembrances are like unto _ashes_, your bodies to bodies of _clay_. "13. Hold your peace, let me alone, that I may speak, and let come on me what will. "14. Wherefore do I take my flesh in my teeth, and put my life in mine hand? "15. Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him: but I will maintain mine own ways before him." In other words, I don't think this thing is right, and, though I tear my flesh with my teeth, and contemplate suicide, and though I may be slain for speaking, yet I will speak out, and maintain that God ought not to have done this thing; he ought not to have sent this horrible affliction on the earth--this fire from heaven, which burned up my cattle; this whirlwind which slew my children; this sand of the sea; this rush of floods; this darkness in noonday in which mankind grope helplessly; these arrows, this poison, this rush of waters, this sweeping away of mountains. "If I hold my tongue," says Job, "I shall give up the ghost!" Job believes-- "The grief that will not speak, Whispers the o'erfraught heart, and bids it break." "As _the waters fail from the sea_," says Job, (xiv, 11,) and the flood _decayeth and drieth up:_ "12. So man _lieth down, and riseth not:_ till the heavens be no more, they shall not awake, nor be raised out of their sleep. {p. 297} 13. O that thou wouldest _hide me_ in the grave, that thou wouldest keep me secret, _until thy wrath be past_, that thou wouldest appoint me a set time, and _remember me!_" What does this mean? When in history have the waters failed from the sea? Job believes in the immortality of the soul (xix, 26): "Though worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God." Can these words then be of general application, and mean that those who lie down and rise not shall not awake for ever? No; he is simply telling that when the conflagration came and dried up the seas, it slaughtered the people by the million; they fell and perished, never to live again; and he calls on God to hide him in a grave, a tomb, a cavern--until the day of his wrath be past, and then to remember him, to come for him, to let him out. "20. My bone cleaveth to my skin and to my flesh, and _I am escaped with the skin of my teeth_." Escaped from what? From his physical disease? No; he carried that with him. But Zophar insists that there is a special providence in all these things, and that only the wicked have perished (chap. xx):