The author meant to refute the doctrine that God's providence is exhaustively explained by distributive justice. Had he his own solution of the problem of theodicy to put in the place of that cruel dogma? Job, we have seen, finds no solution. In the speeches of Jehovah, where dramatic fitness would lead us to look for the author's solution if he had one, there is no refutation of Job's charges, no response to his pleadings. The speeches are splendid, but the gist of them is that God's ways are inscrutable. If man cannot comprehend God's operations in nature, what folly, what presumption, to pretend to fathom his dealings in providence! In that Job acquiesces for the soul of man. Let his sufferings be a mystery, he can submit and trust; call them punitive, and he revolts against the injustice. That is the end to which the author would bring his readers. Some one has said that there is nothing about which men are usually so sure as about the character of God, and nothing they are so ready to do as to interpret his dealings by his character--especially his dealings with others. Such were Job's friends. And from this point of view we have no difficulty in understanding, what has stumbled some critics, how they, with their zeal for God's character--that is, for their orthodox conception of it--come off in the epilogue with so smart a rebuke, while Job, whose words seemed to them sheer blasphemy, is praised for saying what was right about God. The theme of the Book of Job is one which exercised the greatest of the Greek tragic poets, and it is treated with an Æschylean grandeur; in conception and execution it declares the genius of its author. It has not come into our hands altogether as it left his, and certain parts of the poem are generally recognized as additions by other pens.