VI The Penitent's Gospel. "He looketh upon men, and if any say, I have sinned, I have perverted that which was right, and it profited me not; He will deliver his soul from going into the pit, and his life shall see the light.”—JOB XXXIII. 27, 28. HE first verse contains the penitent's creed ; THE the second, the substance of the Gospel. I have sinned, I have perverted that which was right, and it profited me not." It is the whole confession of human sin, its reality, its essence, its fruits. This book touches the depths-the depth of man, the depth of God. Its writer had the longest plummetline which the men of old time were able to drop into the abyss of the Divine counsels. He gauged the mystery, though he could not solve it: the key was not with him, though he could instruct us where to look for it-in the daysman who should explain and justify, as the God-Man alone could explain and justify, the dark and far-reaching methods of the Fatherly discipline of God. I regard the cry for a mediator, with which the Book of Job seems to me to be charged, as one of the chief of those "spiritual things" in the Old Testament Scripture, which, be the difficulties of these records what they may, make the Old Testament one book with the New. We do not find it simply in an isolated passage in this ancient drama of sorrow; it runs through the whole of it, and is in some sort its key. Eliphaz, Bildad, Zophar—the sages charged with the hoary wisdom of the pastthe young and brilliant Elihu, full even to distention. with the new wine of genius, and freighted with the eloquent wisdom of the present, offer themselves successively as God's expositors. But the sufferer will not hear them. His cry is "for God, for the living God," and this is the real essence of the book. On this, as the spinal column, the whole form depends; for books may be vertebrate as well as men. The cry grows more earnest as the pitiless mongers of orthodox platitudes are successively silenced, and it is answered at length by the appearing of the Lord himself. He came with lightning and tempest, and out of the whirlwind the awful challenge broke. But still He came. The cry was heard, the daysman appeared; the passionate appeal of this agonized spirit was not stifled, but answered; and a prophecy of the Incarnation was given to the world. Sin, confession, and forgiveness or rather restoration, are the themes of these verses; and they are treated with a brevity and simplicity, but at the same time with a profound truth and completeness, which is characteristic of all the spiritual utterance of the book. "If any say, I have sinned.” That implies fundamentally that evil is not of God. The penitent has broken through all the webs of sophistry which the cunning intellect spins to hide from the fallen spirit the reality of its guilt and its doom. The dreary philosophy which includes sin as a part of God's arrangement of the universe, merely the necessary relief and foil of goodness, the night as the back-ground of the day-destroying man's responsibility, and making God unright Again, eous who taketh vengeance-to him is a mere wilderness of words. He knows that there is a right and a wrong, wide as the poles asunder. "There was no confusion," he says, "in my mind about them, there was that within me which testified what was of God and what was of the devil; I saw the right, I knew that it was right; a spirit within me said, 'Choose the right and it shall be well with thee,' and I chose the wrong. again, again, in spite of the light of God, in spite of the spirit of God, in spite of my own convictions, and in the face of my knowledge of the end, I have said to evil, 'be thou my God,' to sin, 'be thou my delight,' to the world, 'be thou my bride.' I have perverted that which was right. I, in the full exercise of the freedom of my manhood; have done it, and I must bear the burden and meet the doom. I dare not say that God tempted me to evil, I dare not say that the devil forced me. I have done it. I have made evil a part of my being, I have taken its virus into the springs of my action, I have brought its taint into the currents. of my blood, and I have to bear it, if there be no deliverance, while my being endures. Schoolmen, |