Job, thus read, becomes a semi-dramatic poem, in which the problem of the disconnection of goodness and good-fortune, the lack of any just ordering of individual life, is discussed in the persons of an upright and sorely afflicted patriarch and his three friends, who come to condole and counsel with him. Through their interchanging colloquies, that bring up one after another the stock theories of the age of the author, the argument moves along without really getting on. No solution is found for the perplexing puzzle, in which man's moral instincts beat vainly against the hard facts of life. Once, for a moment, the thought of a future life flashes up, as the true solution of the injustice of earth, in that thrilling cry of the tortured soul: I know that my Redeemer liveth, And that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth: And though, after my skin, worms destroy this body, Yet out of my flesh shall I see God; Whom I shall see for myself, And mine eyes shall behold, and not as a stranger. But the vision fades upon an atmosphere unready for it, and the poet does not return to follow this clue out into the sunshine. All the light that he can discern is in Nature's manifestations of power and order and wisdom. From a wide range of knowledge, the poet draws together upon the stage the wonders of creation, which, with daring freedom, he introduces God himself as describing; until at length Job humbles himself in an awe not uncheered by trust: Therefore have I uttered that I understood not. Things too wonderful for me which I knew not. * * * * * I have heard of Thee by the hearing of the ear; But now mine eye seeth Thee. Wherefore I abhor myself, And repent in dust and ashes. By dropping out the episode of Elihu, as an insertion of some later hand, the movement of the poem becomes sustained and progressive. The arguments of the Jewish theology are cleverly presented, while the swift, sure sense of justice in the sufferer pierces all sophisms, and riddles all pious conventionalities. The descriptions of Nature are graphic and eloquent. The _motif_ of the drama is one that voices the thought and feeling of our far-off age, in which many men again vainly thresh the old arguments of conventional theology, in trying to solve the "godless look of earth," and take refuge anew in the manifestations of power and law in nature; not without the ancient lesson, let us trust, of an awe which silences and purifies, and leaves them in the light as of a mystery of meaning on the sphynx's face, breaking into the dawning of a day which "uttereth speech." Scientific agnosticism, in so far as it is an humble confession of human ignorance, has its worship scored in this noble poem, ringing the changes on the strain, at once plaint and praise: