The story must be otherwise helped out, so some kindly champion of orthodoxy put in a fairy-story climax,--Job got well of his boils, had more sheep and oxen than ever, had other children born to him. And so the difficulty is happily solved! But the earlier and deeper words remain, with their unanswerable challenge to the comfortable creed that God will always make the good man happy. The book stands, the expression of a typical, a mournful but sublime attitude of the human mind. It is a facing of truth when truth looks darkest, rather than to take refuge in comfortable make-believe. And it shows man falling back on his innermost stronghold of all. If God himself fail me,--if the power of the universe be cruel or indifferent,--yet "my righteousness I hold fast, and will not let it go; my heart shall not reproach me so long as I live." The habitual weapon of the Prophets is denunciation. They pour out on their opponents a wrath which is the hotter because it involves a moral condemnation, and the heavier because it claims the sanction of Deity. Among their exemplars are Samuel deposing Saul, and scaring him from the tomb, and Elijah slaying the priests of Baal. Of the written prophecies the characteristic word is "Woe unto you!" They are the prototypes of Jesus assailing the Pharisees and driving out the money-changers; of the book of Revelation; of Tertullian proclaiming the torments of the damned; of the mediaeval ban on the heretic; of Puritan and Catholic hurling anathemas at each other; of Carlyle, of Garrison. But in the greatest of the prophets the threat is almost hidden by the promise, and instead of cursing there is benediction. Whoever would get at the heart of the Old Testament, and understand the spell which the religion first of Judaism and then of Christianity has cast upon the world for thousands of years, should ponder the book of Isaiah. It blends the work of two authors, but their spirit is closely akin. In each case the prophet is full of a conviction so intense that he propounds it with perfect confidence as the word of God. By the boldest personification, he speaks continually in the name of God. This was the characteristic method of Hebrew prophecy. The prophetic books all stand as for the most part the direct word of God. This way of thought and speech was possible only to men in an early stage of intellectual development and under the highest pressure of conviction and emotion.