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 CHAPTER III.

THE THIRD CYCLE OF SPEECHES.

(CHAPS. XXII.-XXXI.)

It is not wonderful that the gulf between Job and his friends should only be widened by such a direct contradiction of the orthodox tenet. The friends, indeed, cannot but feel the force of Job's appeal to experience, as they show by the violence of their invective. But they are neither candid nor, above all, courageous enough to confess the truth; they speak, as the philosopher Kant observes, as if they knew their powerful Client was listening in the background. And so a third cycle of speeches begins (chaps. xxii.-xxxi.), in which the friends grasp the only weapon left them and charge Job directly with being a great sinner. True to his character, however, Eliphaz even here seeks to soften the effect of his accusations by a string of most enticing promises, partly worldly and partly other-worldly in their character, and which in a different context Job would have heartily appreciated (xxii. 21-30).

But Job cares not to reply to those charges of Eliphaz; his mind is still too much absorbed in the painful mystery of his own lot and that of all other righteous sufferers. He longs for God to set up his tribunal, so that Job and his fellows might plead their cause (xxiii. 3-7, xxiv. 1). What most of all disturbs him is that he cannot see God—that is cannot detect the operation of that moral God in whom his heart cannot help believing. 'I may go forward, but he is not there; and backward, but I cannot perceive him' (xxiii. 8). With the ardour of a pessimist he depicts this failure of justice in the darkest colours (chap. xxiv.), and is as powerless as ever to reconcile his deep sense of what God ought to