What is the purpose of the book? This question has been answered in so many ways that a judgment regarding it must be put forth with the greatest diffidence. Almost every theory that has been adopted has found itself in collision with one or more of the parts of which the book now consists, and has been able to maintain itself only by sacrificing these parts upon its altar.
1. In the Book of Job nothing less than a campaign of centuries is dramatically compressed into a single decisive battle. The Israelites of the pre-Exiiic time, mastered by a mighty monotheism that had not yet reached the stage of enlightenment at which the origin and existence of evil become an urgent speculative problem, have a facile explanation of all sufferings. To them, as their Scriptures mirror their minds to us, there is no mystery of pain. God being all in all, and every event, morally or materially hurtful as well as beneficial, being traced to His immediate action, He rules the affairs of men with a justice so rigid and exact that it is always well with the righteous and ill with the wicked. The Divine government accomplishes that which the best human government can only attempt-it rewards the deserving and punishes the guilty. The causal nexus between goodness and prosperity, sin and suffering, is never broken. Health, wealth, peace, comfort, long life are the lot of the true servants of God; sickness, poverty, trouble, disaster, early death are the portion of the wicked. One's outward condition is always tell-tale, success being the indication of God's favour, failure of His anger. Accident and partiality are alike unknown. Famine, earthquake, pestilence, defeat in war, are the punishment of sin; abundance of corn, wine, and oil, a peaceful home, and a numerous progeny, the reward of righteousness. In the field of destiny, which is this earth, men reap what they have sown. No light of immortality has yet been shed upon human lives; there is no judgment in Sheol, where all things are alike to all. The present life, rounded and complete in itself, alone counts for anything, and between the cradle and the grave men receive what they merit. A man's life and his lot in life must correspond, otherwise God would be unjust.
2. This theory, as the author of the book sees clearly enough, is fraught with difficulties. The problem of the mystery of pain and suffering weighed heavily upon his mind, and through the medium of the old patriarchal story he would set his thoughts upon it before his contemporaries. He himself has no complete and consistent theory to put in the place of the old one which he demolishes, but one thing he can see clearly enough, viz., that you have no right to argue back from suffering to sin, and this he is determined to make others see as well. Further, there are various considerations, each of which requires to be taken into account, which he brings forward in the several portions of the poem. It is in the second and longest section that the workings of his mind are most fully revealed, and in this the main interest of the book is centred. It must be remembered that the parties to the debate knew nothing whatever of the scene in heaven as described in the Prologue. The author of the book by placing this in the forefront has admitted us behind the scenes, and let us into the secret of Job's sufferings. They formed, as so many sufferings form to-day, a God-permitted Satanic temptation, allowed in order to test the patriarch's faith, and try whether his goodness was genuine, or whether his piety was after all a subtle form of selfishness, a serving God for what he could get out of Him. But of this neither Job himself nor the friends were aware. They only knew what they could see with the eye of sense. Here was a man who had lived in great prosperity, honoured and respected of all men, suddenly overwhelmed with calamity after calamity-his flocks and his herds destroyed, his children dead, himself a victim of a most loathsome disease. What did it all mean? That was the problem before them.
3. If we bring the Prologue and the Debate into combination we perceive that it was the author's purpose to widen men's views of God's providence, and to set before them a new view of suffering. With great skill he employs Job as his instrument to clear the ground of the old theories, and he himself brings forward in their place his new truth, that suffering may befall the innocent, and be not a chastisement for their sins but a trial of their righteousness.
But the Book of Job was more than a commentary on popular theories of providence: it had a practical aim as well. If we fix the date of its composition in the period which saw the destruction of Jerusalem and the deportation of the flower of the population to Babylon, we may hold that it was addressed to that section of the people who in a corrupt age remained faithful to Jehovah. The Remnant, as they are called by the prophets, must have had a history full of suffering and full of perplexity. Their courage and confidence were sorely tried. The author hoped that the example of Job would appeal to his contemporaries. It was an example of disinterested righteousness, to emulate which was perhaps the only ambition left to them. It was that he might inspire them with strength sufficient for the terrible strain to which they also were being subjected that he told them the story of the patriarch's vast patience and indomitable faith.
The secret of Adèle Kamm's abiding and triumphant joy lay in the fact that it was constantly renewed in the hidden depths of the unfailing fountains of pain. In the crucible of Christian faith her sorrow was turned into a wonderful joy. Her faith was of an essentially living and individual type. She owed very little to human teaching. She grew up in her own way, educated in the severe but wholesome school of suffering. If we may mention any one book which, read at the right moment, brought heavenly light to her soul, we do so knowing that it had this effect on her simply because she found in it the reflection of her own personality; and because it gave her intense joy to find her own thoughts set forth with absolute clearness, thoughts which up till that moment had been confused, vague, and semi-articulate. Such was her experience on reading the book entitled Studies on the Value of Suffering [by Ernest Rostan].
“You cannot imagine,” she wrote to Mr. M., “my feelings of profound surprise and satisfaction when, on opening the unknown book which you had so kindly lent me, I discovered that I was reading an exact interpretation of all my thoughts, whether clearly defined or only half conscious (even to myself), and indeed the expression of my deepest feelings. For those who have not suffered much the chapter on ‘Expiation through Suffering' may well seem very mysterious and almost unreal. That is why, until now, I have always taken care to hide the secret of my joy in suffering in the deepest recesses of my soul. Faith and the love of God in Christ can give the only consolation to those in affliction, but I believe the source of abiding joy in constant suffering, lies in a somewhat vague, confused, but real sense of vicarious sacrifice. Even when this feeling becomes more definite, we cannot go to our neighbour and say, ‘I am in a state of heavenly bliss unknown to the majority of men and women, because I know that I am suffering a direct chastisement inflicted by God, not only for my own sins but also for the sins of the whole world, for that burden of guilt which would overwhelm us altogether were it not for the atoning sacrifice of Jesus Christ, and that of the members of His Church.' This holy joy would be misunderstood, criticism would soon extinguish the sacred flame which burns in the depths of the soul, and I have never mentioned the subject to any one.”
The reason why Adèle Kamm could enter into such full sympathy with Mr. Rostan was that he too was a comrade in suffering. He had trodden the same path and had reached the same goal. He bases his whole argument upon the words of St. Paul: “I … fill up on my part that which is lacking of the afflictions of Christ in my flesh for His body's sake, which is the Church,” the word “Church” being taken in its broadest sense and covering the whole of regenerate humanity.1 [Note: A Living Witness: The Life of Adèle Kamm (1914), 180, 185.]
Suffering may be desired, not as the reward of a kind of self-interested devotion, but as a condition in which we are brought nearer to the attainment of an object which is, in itself, worth all the sacrifices of which man is capable. When the saint rises to fresh heights he realizes that all great things are in reality accomplished by God through the medium of man, and therefore, as far as he himself is concerned, he desires suffering solely as a means of destroying self-love and everything that tends to separate him from the object of his love.1 [Note: Henri Joly, The Psychology of the Saints.]
When this world's pleasures for my soul sufficed,
Ere my heart's plummet sounded depths of pain,
I called on reason to control my brain,
And scoffed at that old story of the Christ.
But when o'er burning wastes my feet had trod,
And all my life was desolate with loss,
With bleeding hands I clung about the cross,
And cried aloud, “Man needs a suffering God!”2 [Note: Ella Wheeler Wilcox, Poems of Life, 13.]
