"Gaze onward without claim to hope,
Nor, gazing backward, court regret."
This is the only system of morality deserving that much-abused name; it was preached and to a great extent practised in India by the Jainists and the Buddhists, and for the first time in the Old Testament by the author of our poem.
All the ills and sorrows of life, merited and unmerited alike, Job is prepared for. They are the commonplaces of human existence and as inseparable from it as shadow from light. But what he cannot endure is the thought that his good name, the sole comfort left him in his misery, shall be sacrificed to a theological theory which runs counter to every fact of public history and private experience. This is an injustice which seems to strike at the root of all morality, and he passionately attacks all who uphold it, even though God Himself be of the number. For he has unshaken faith in eternal justice as something independent even of the deity. Its manifestations may be imperceptible and incomprehensible to us, but it governs the universe all the same, and faith in this fact was his lodestar when sun and moon had gone out and the aimless tornado raged around and ghastly horrors issued from the womb of Night. The wicked may prosper and the just man die on a dunghill, scorned by all and seemingly forsaken by God Himself, but it is none the less true that sin and suffering, virtue and reward are fruits of the same tree, one and indivisible. They are the manna the taste of which adapts itself to the eater. Job expresses the conviction, which St. Bernard so aptly formulated when he said: "Nought can harm me but myself;" and it is this conviction that nerves and sustains him in his defiant challenge to the Most High and prompts his appeal to eternal justice against even God Himself:
"Will he plead against me with his almighty power?
If not, then not even he would prevail against me.
For a righteous one would dispute with him." (ccxvi.)
But after the theophany, when the truth has dawned upon the mind of the heroic sufferer, he sees that eternal justice needs not even this certificate of its existence, that it can dispense with the most eloquent human advocate, and he waives what he had theretofore held to be his indefeasible right and puts the crown on his system of ethics by enduring his lot in silence.
Peace grounded on knowledge, therefore, is the end of Job's doubts and misgivings. But it is not the knowledge of a reward to come, a presentiment of the joys of heaven, of an everlasting feeding-trough where our hunger and thirst for existence shall be satiated for ever and ever. It is that sobering knowledge which is increase of sorrow. Injustice in the world there is none; if all beings living are liable to pain, and everything animate and inanimate is subject to decay and death, the reason is that suffering and dissolution are the conditions of existence, which is therefore an evil. To desire the one is to wish for or accept the other. This is the conviction which brings peace to the soul of the hero and enables him to exclaim:
"I resign and console myself,
Though in dust and ashes."
Footnotes:
[49] Strophe cxxi.
[50] Lagarde seems to have hit the mark when he affirms that the poet's faith in God reduces itself to a vague belief in the divine.