1. It is the Hebrew religion that sets the problem of the Book of Job. In the Greek tragedy of Prometheus Bound, Prometheus evokes our sympathy by sufferings so intense that only a superhuman being can endure them, which are to continue for long ages, where all hope of rest in death is excluded, because the sufferer is immortal and divine. Moreover, there is a special pathos in the story, because Prometheus has brought his fate upon himself by his unselfish love of human kind. But Prometheus suffers no mental pain from the thought that one holier than he is his enemy. In character Zeus is inferior to Prometheus, and Prometheus had helped Zeus to the throne, and had good cause to reproach him with ingratitude; he also looked forward to a crisis when Zeus would need his help again, and would be forced to make peace with him. Meanwhile Prometheus defies his persecutor, and declares that he would rather be as he is, would rather continue nailed to the bleak rock than do the behest of the reigning gods like Hermes, the humble messenger of Zeus.
The Hebrew, on the other hand, descries the immediate action of God everywhere, in all things small and great, good and evil. From such a God, omniscient, omnipotent, the sole Creator and Ruler of heaven and earth, there is no escape. Thus it is the purity of Hebrew revelation that makes the agony intolerable, and renders the spectacle of Job's sorrow unique in literature. The holy and the righteous One is his enemy, He whom Job in the depth of his heart still believes to be holy and righteous, still believes to be merciful and loving, though in the strain and stress of suffering he often speaks as if this faith had died out in him. “Oh that I were as in months past, as in the days when God preserved me, when his candle shined upon my head.” Plainly the Hebrew poem is far more subtle and interior than the sublime tragedy of Æschylus.
Even in Buddhism the problem does not exist, though Buddhism, a religion based on the recognition of sorrow, seems to thrill throughout with the consciousness of suffering. The four “Noble Truths” on which it is built are: the reality of sorrow, its cause, its cure, and the way to the cure. The idea that inspires the Buddha is pity, pity for the world's pain. There is no creature too mean for his compassion; the only being too high for it is the saint who has entered into his everlasting rest. But though Buddhism is so touched and possessed with the miseries of man, it does not know the problem that so troubled Israel. To it sorrow is of the very essence of life, inseparable from it; to be is to suffer. It knows a moral order but no moral Deity, a law that fulfils itself through action, that binds act and issue so indissolubly together that every moment of desire or sin must exact its consequent moment of pain. It does not feel the injustice or wrong of the innocent suffering, for to it there is no innocence; it is not conscious of the evil of guiltless sorrow, for to it all sorrow is guilty, all personal being evil. Pessimism is helpless in the face of the evil it bewails, simply accepts it as necessary to existence, abhors and tries to renounce existence that it may escape from evil.
2. With the Hebrews, the thought of God as an ethical God seems to have been present from the dawn of their history and though sometimes it had to struggle almost for existence against other and lower conceptions, yet it was constantly recognized as Israel's inalienable inheritance. In the minds of the prophets of Israel and Judah there burned a real passion for righteousness between man and man; and this was fed by a firm belief in a God who “loveth righteousness and hateth iniquity.” Mosaism also had proclaimed with no uncertain tones man's duty towards God. There also “to do right” and “to obey God” are synonymous terms. “Righteousness” is merely another term for “keeping the words of God's covenant.” And only they that obey God and do His will can live long and enjoy good days. “If ye shall hearken diligently unto my commandments … I will give the rain of your land in its season, … and I will give grass in thy fields … and thou shalt eat and be full.” So similarly in Deu_28:1-68 and Lev_26:1-46 we have a dire and gruesome catalogue of ills that shall befall the people, if they will not hearken to the voice of Jehovah, to observe all His commandments.
The earliest phenomenon likely to be observed connected with the moral government of the world is the general one, that on the whole, as things are constituted, good men prosper and are happy, bad men fail and are miserable. The cause of such a condition is no mystery, and lies very near the surface. As soon as men combine in society, they are forced to obey certain laws under which alone society is possible, and these laws, even in their rudest form, approach the laws of conscience. To a certain extent, every one is obliged to sacrifice his private inclinations; and those who refuse to do so are punished, or are crushed. If society were perfect, the imperfect tendency would carry itself out till the two sets of laws were identical; but perfection so far has been only in Utopia, and, as far as we can judge by experience hitherto, they have approximated most nearly in the simplest and most rudimentary forms of life. Under the systems which we call patriarchal, the modern distinction between sins and crimes had no existence. All gross sins were offences against society, as it then was constituted, and, wherever it was possible, were punished as being so; chicanery and those subtle advantages which the acute and unscrupulous can take over the simple, without open breach of enacted statutes, became possible only under the complications of more artificial polities; and the oppression or injury of man by man was open, violent, obvious, and therefore easily understood. Doubtless, therefore, in such a state of things it would, on the whole, be true to experience that, judging merely by outward prosperity or the reverse, good and bad men would be rewarded and punished as such in this actual world; so far, that is, as the administration of such rewards and punishments was left in the power of mankind. But theology could not content itself with general tendencies. Theological propositions then, as much as now, were held to be absolute, universal, admitting of no exceptions, and explaining every phenomenon. Superficial generalizations were construed into immutable decrees; the God of this world was just and righteous, and temporal prosperity or wretchedness were dealt out by Him immediately by His own will to His subjects according to their behaviour. Thus the same disposition towards completeness which was the ruin of paganism, here, too, was found generating the same evils; the half truth rounding itself out with falsehoods. Not only the consequences of ill actions which followed through themselves, but the accidents, as we call them, of nature-earthquake, storms, and pestilences-were the ministers of God's justice, and struck sinners only, with discriminating accuracy. That the sun should shine alike on the evil and the good was a creed too high for the early divines, or that the victims of a fallen tower were no greater offenders than their neighbours. The conceptions of such men could not pass beyond the outward temporal consequence; and if God's hand was not there it was nowhere.1 [Note: J. A. Froude, Short Studies on Great Subjects, i. 290.]
3. We find this early stage of the nation's development reflected in the middle part of the Book of Proverbs. It must have been in a time of national prosperity and social quietude that the sages, as the result of prolonged observation, gave forth such maxims as these: “By humility and the fear of the Lord are riches, and honour, and life”; “He that followeth after righteousness and mercy findeth life, righteousness, and honour”; “When a man's ways please the Lord, he maketh even his enemies to be at peace with him”; “The fear of the Lord tendeth to life: and he that hath it shall abide satisfied; he shall not be visited with evil.” The First Psalm also, which Delitzsch and others consider to be of Solomonic authorship, reveals the same creed as we have been describing, when it declares of the righteous, that “he shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water; his leaf also shall not wither; and whatsoever he doeth shall prosper.”
To this conviction of the close connexion between sin and suffering, the prophets again and again appealed. Thus Isaiah, speaking to his countrymen when Judah had been scourged by Sennacherib till from head to foot it was one festering sore, chides the infatuation which blinds them to the truth and sternly utters Jehovah's ultimatum: “Come now, and let us reason together, saith the Lord: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool. If ye be willing and obedient, ye shall eat the good of the land: but if ye refuse and rebel, ye shall be devoured with the sword: for the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it.”
4. The problem comes into distinctness in the prophecy of Habakkuk. If Habakkuk saw his vision in the gloomy period before the fall of Jerusalem, his problem arises because he feels so keenly the strange contrast between the fair promise of the happiness that should follow on reform, and the dark fulfilment now that reform has come. If it was during the Exile, then the destruction of the Jewish State and the Captivity are responsible for much of the prophet's perplexity, and the Reformation falls into the background. But though in view of the uncertainties we cannot state problem or solution with precision, yet they may be stated with sufficient accuracy for our purpose. Speaking generally, his problem rises out of the oppression of the righteous and the prosperity of the violent oppressor, while the answer he receives is that retribution is certainly coming, and that the righteous shall live by his firm fidelity to Jehovah.
The prophet's mind is fixed on the certainty of the tyrant's overthrow, even though delay may seem to justify despair. Retribution lay in the nature of things. His empire was based on brutality, so he should perish in the blood that he had spilt. His exploits filled him with an impious arrogance, so Heaven must crush him and vindicate its outraged majesty. In the methods of swelling his empire, and the temper with which success inspired him, lurked the secret of his ruin. All this is a very impressive moral lesson that does not quickly grow out of date, but it adds nothing essentially new. The prosperity of the wicked is not explained; we are simply told that it cannot last.
5. Ezekiel takes a step forward. With remarkable courage he repudiates the earlier conception of solidarity. It is wholly untrue to say that the Jews are suffering for the sins of their fathers. There is no such thing as vicarious punishment, or vicarious reward. The father cannot suffer for the sin of the son, nor the son for the sin of his father. It is not true that the soul that sins shall escape, and another perish in its stead. The soul that sins, it and no other shall die. “The righteousness of the righteous shall be upon him, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon him.” The misfortunes of the people were therefore not, as they, in agreement with their own historian, urged, a penalty for the sins of Manasseh, but the just reward of their own.
This doctrine of individual responsibility created a revolution in religious thought and life. It is easy to criticise it, and show that the doctrine of solidarity expressed a truth deeply rooted in experience. The old saying is true that the sins of the fathers are visited on the children. We are members one of another, no man lives to himself, our character and conduct alike are largely determined, for good or ill, by forces in whose release we had no share. It is hot by denying patent facts that we shall vindicate the order under which we live. Yet Ezekiel's doctrine of individual responsibility is not on that account to be brushed aside as illegitimate. Not only does it express a great truth, but a truth that needed just then to be asserted, even in an exaggerated form. To the man who bore on his conscience the load of a guilt not his own the prophet spoke a liberating word: a man has to answer only for sins he has himself committed. To those who thought that the righteousness of the fathers availed to make good deficiencies of their own the stern law is proclaimed that none can be saved by the good deeds of another, even of the best. There is no transfer of merit, there is, indeed, no superfluous merit to be transferred. “Though these three men, Noah, Daniel, and Job, were in it, they should deliver but their own souls by their righteousness, saith the Lord Yahweh.”1 [Note: A. S. Peake, The Problem of Suffering in the Old Testament, 24.]
Your soul, my brother, and mine, they are privileged, they are free. God is the explanation of their mysterious wealth of endowment, the interpretation of their mystic, half-articulated longings. From God they come, to God they go. He is their source, and He their end. To state this is to assert the solemn fact-responsibility. Philosophers have fancied that each movement of thought displaces some molecule of the brain, so that every airy fancy registers itself in material fact. Anyhow, this is true; every free choice of the creature between good and evil has an eternal import, and it may be, it will be if you will have it so, a splendid destiny. My brother, in your hurrying, perhaps self-seeking, life, have you thought of that?1 [Note: W. J. Knox Little, Manchester Sermons, 38.]
Responsibility is man's dignity, and it offers him development: every thought that man evolves from his consciousness affects the welfare of the world; and every word that man utters goes about the world seeking a response.
Each new discovery is a new responsibility.
To perceive a duty is to be bound by the perception; and he who sees the heedless on the edge of a precipice, without warning him, is responsible for his death.
He who manfully undertakes his personal responsibilities, often fails to realize his national responsibilities.
When every man seeks the welfare of all men, every man will be happy.
It is an unrecognized vice to do nothing for other men's benefit; a man should seek, not only those who can help him, but those whom he can help: there can be no greater misery than to have helped no one.2 [Note: E. G. Cheyne, The Man with the Mirror (1914), 113.]
