Thus, by a strange but unperceived incongruity, St. James makes the unconscious impatience of primitive Christianity a basis for his exhortation to conscious patience. Early Christians, in their eagerness for the return of their Lord, impatiently believed that His return was imminent; and St. James uses this belief as an argument for patient waiting and patient endurance. It is only for a short time that they will have to wait and endure, and then the rich reward will be reaped. Ploughing and harrowing are toilsome and painful, but they have to be gone through, and then, after no intolerable waiting, the harvest comes. Above, when St. James was rebuking his readers for their presumptuous confidence respecting their future plans, he reminded them of the shortness of life. "What is your life? For ye are a vapour, that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away" (iv. 14). Here the shortness of the interval between the present moment and the end of all things is urged as a reason both for circumspection and for patience. In both cases, with his characteristic fondness for illustrations drawn from nature, he employs physical phenomena to enforce his lesson. In the one case life is a vapour, not substantial at any time, and soon dispersed;[86] in the other case life is the work and the waiting which must precede the harvest. The key-note of the whole passage is _patience_, which in one form or another occurs six times in five verses In the original two different words are used--one (μακροθμεῖν and μακροθμία) four times in the first four verses; and the other (ὑπομένειν and ὑπομενή) twice in the last verse, where we certainly need "the _endurance_ of Job" rather than "the _patience_ of Job," in order to preserve the transition from the one word to the other. "Take, brethren, for an example of suffering and of _patience_ (μακροθυμίας) the prophets who spake in the Name of the Lord. Behold, we call them blessed which _endured_ (τοὺς ὑπομείναντας): ye have heard of the _endurance_ (ὑπομενήν) of Job." It was perhaps because "the _patience_ of Job" has become a proverbial formula that the Revisers banished "endurance" to the margin, instead of placing it in the text.[87] The two words are not infrequently found together (2 Cor. vi. 4-6; Col. i. 11; 2 Tim. iii. 10; Clement of Rome, lviii.; Ignatius, _Ephes._ iii.). The difference between the two is, on the whole, this, that the first is the long-suffering which does not retaliate upon oppressive persons, the second the endurance which does not succumb under oppressive things. The persecuted prophets exhibited the one; the afflicted Job exhibited the other. The oppressed and poor Christians whom St. James addresses are able to practise both these forms of patience, which Chrysostom extols as the "queen of the virtues."