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the eloquent preacher with whom I began, listened to his fervid inculcation of the sublimest truths-and then forgot to practise them!

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Yours truly,

R. E. H. G.

LETTER XXVIII.

To the Same.

Tuesday, June 10, 1843.

My dear Friend,

The "suspicions," you say, of your friend were unjust and hard to bear. Yes; unjust suspicion is always the very hardest thing to bear,-except, indeed, just suspicion. Do we want proof? Why, look at Job. There we see a submission, equally magnanimous and sweet, till his friends came to "comfort him." What, by the bye, must be the condition of a man, when his greatest plagues are his "consolations ?"

Thus was it with the Patriarch. His wife was bad enough, no doubt; and truly politic was the astute malignity of Satan in letting her remain, whatever else he took away; according to Coleridge's epigram :

"He took his honours, took his wealth,

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But his wife was nothing to his friends. She was a blasphemous idiot, unless the translators have done her injustice; and Job gets rid of her, as the Antiquary might have done, by telling her she spake as one of the "foolish womankind." But only think of the greater folly of the three philosophic "Consolers," who came to see their friend in the extremity of his

desolation, and had nothing better to tell him than that they were very sorry to find him a great reprobate; hoped that, instead of offensive protestations of innocence, he would make a clean breast of it, and gratify them by telling them what a hoary old hypocrite he had been ! It is a thousand pities that they broke their long silence of "seven days; they would have done much better in their character of mutes, and might have thus played their parts as decently as our modern friends of the same name, in other funereal scenes.

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It is true that Job spake many things "unadvisedly with his lips;" but how can we wonder at it, goaded on by such peculiar 66 consolations?"

It would evidently have been better for Job, if he had said at once, "Not at home," on his dunghill, to these "comfortable gentlemen." It is observable that his tone was altered immediately after their appearance. When he spoke, even before they had spoken to him, he seems a changed man. He did not open his mouth to curse his day and to give expression to all those bitter, yet sublime and pathetic lamentations that he "had ever seen the light," till he saw these curious sympathisers before him. I sometimes think there must have been something in their very presence that galled him; that they gazed at him, perhaps even before they spoke, with severe and sanctimonious looks which betrayed unuttered suspicions, or assumed a little of that pompous air with which complacent prosperity is apt to regard humiliation and misery. There is something very sweet in the reproof given to these unfriendly friends in the "dénouement" of the scene. It has always appeared to me as if, in entirely passing by Job's unquestionable folly in some of his passionate utterances, the Divine Benignity made allowance for those harsh speeches as extorted from him in the anguish of his soul under the pressure of his calamities, the most bitter of which was his friends' condolence. It is as though God looked on these as involuntary, torn from him under a condition in which moral self-control was lost in physical and mental agony; and so, thinking only of the substantial truth of Job's declarations of rectitude, and of the more enlarged views

which, on the whole, he took of the divine administration, his condescending Maker refuses to take notice of these escapades of His afflicted child, while He visits with severe rebuke the conduct of Bildad the Shuhite and his two amiable auxiliaries; because, while uttering many "wise saws and solemn truisms, they had indulged in such uncharitable suspicions, and had been so utterly careless about the anguish they were causing. He was

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"angry" that they had not spoken the thing that was right, " as His servant Job ;" and they were to go to His "servant Job" to be prayed for, and eat humble pie, and a good large slice of it too (I should like to have seen their faces while they were munching it), else their leisurely and inhuman philosophy would have got them into a scrape.

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By the bye, is there not exquisite nature in the gradual way in which the "wordy strife," once begun, goes on increasing in harshness and uncharitableness? The "friends" at first, express their suspicions with circumlocution and polite ambiguity, and the “ifs "— which, however, are no "peacemakers are abundant. But as the controversy proceeds, they become as thoughtless of Job's feelings and of the pangs they cause, as a Majendie in dissecting a live jackass! There is human nature for you! Once get angry for an hypothesis, even though an ethical one, and our ethical philosopher will trample charity, pity, truth itself, and every cardinal virtue under heaven in the mire, sooner than surrender a tatter of it.

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The pathos of that bitter cry, "Have pity on me, oh! my friends, have pity on me, for the hand of God hath touched me," -extorts nothing from the "Consolations of Philosophy" on this occasion. Eliphaz the Temanite is prompt to answer the multitude of words" with a greater multitude; and "full of talk” himself, asks whether "a man full of talk is to be justified? Zophar the Naamathite has heard the "check of his reproach," and hastens to show that he is not going to stand that; while Bildad the Shuhite wants to know, in a prolix speech, how long it will be before Job "makes an end of words?" One and all hasten to enter their protest against Job's reasonings, and vindicate

their system of dogmatic theology; bring him in guilty of "uttering lies," "mocking God," "casting off fear," "restraining prayer;" of a "crafty tongue," and the "hope of the hypocrite!" wonder at last, after Job's final and most sublime self-vindication, that he intrenches himself in that indignant silence which is yet more touching than his pathos, and exclaims, "The words of Job are ended." It is a great wonder to me that the good man did not fairly succumb under the weight of his friends' sympathy and consolation.

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From this unlucky experiment, I think we may infer that when we see any man in trouble, and have nothing better to say to him than that he is probably scourged for sins of which we know nothing, we had better hold our tongues; but, at all events, let us not wonder that such suspicions embitter the spirit of man far more than the troubles themselves.

By the way, and quite apart from this particular and unexampled case of condolence, I should say that it is better, at least in great troubles, to be at first without human sympathy altogether. A man in his senses, left alone with God and himself, manages, I sometimes think, better than with a host of merely mortal "Consolateurs." In the presence of the Infinite,—like Job before those accursed tongues began to wag,- we fall down prostrate, and hush the heart in silence. But if we begin to talk much with others, or they with us, - beshrew that confounded tongue (theirs and ours) !— it somehow reacts on the heart and the understanding, and produces disquiet. Like the clang of a trumpet, it excites emotions that, but for it, might have slumbered. Sometimes, too, the platitudes which a mind at ease utters to a mind in anguish (however true they may be), and the provoking tranquillity with which they are doled out, chafe and irritate us. Sometimes we are told we grieve too much, and sometimes not in the right way; sometimes a consolation is hinted which is felt to be none; sometimes we are told to be cheerful, when we feel we can't; and more frequently than all, and perhaps worse than all, comes a bit of moral " prosing," which has been anticipated by our own mind a thousand times, and the repetition of which only tends

to make us impatient. Perhaps I am peculiarly sensitive in this matter; but I confess I have never been in profundis (and I have several times been so) without wishing every friend that came to see me, at Jericho.

I remember, in one of the most sorrowful hours of my life, meeting by chance with a relation who had suffered a like calamity. I had not seen her for years; I have never seen her since; I can never see her again, at least in this world. We met, clasped hands, looked into each other's eyes, read, reciprocally, the whole tale of each other's sorrows there, exchanged all unutterable thoughts, and, without speaking one word, passed on. I will venture to say we said more, and more to the purpose too, than if we had been exchanging commonplaces of condolence from that day to this.

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Ever yours,

R. E. H. G.

LETTER XXIX.

To the Same.

Great Barr, Aug. 1843.

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My dear West,

I am not ashamed to say that, after you left me, I felt very much like a fish out of water, if indeed you know how that feels. I could settle to nothing. My books seemed uninteresting, the garden walk, we had so often paced of late, intolerably lonesome, - the silent piano a positively disagreeable object. The sun shines as bright over the green fields and hills as when we rambled and talked so merrily there yesterday, and yet it seems to shine with a sombre and melancholy light. Certainly those of us who live almost absolutely in solitude are much to be pitied when we have parted with a friend; for, if the pleasure of seeing him is keen in proportion to the rarity of the enjoyment, the separation

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