"One or two thoughts respecting Job's trial. That he should at last give way was only probable: he was, in short, another Adam, and had another fall, albeit he wrestled nobly. Worthy was he to be named among God's chosen three, 'Noah, Daniel, and Job,' and worthy that the Lord should bless his latter end. This word brings me to the point I wish to touch on,—the great compensation which God gave to Job. Children can never be regarded as other than individualities, and notwithstanding Eastern feelings about increase in quantity, its quality is, after all, the question for the heart. I mean that many children to be born is but an inadequate return for many children dying. If a father loses a well-beloved son, it is small recompense of that aching void that he gets another. For this reason of the affections, and because I suppose that thinkers have sympathised with me in the difficulty, I wish to say a word about Job's children lost and found. It will clear away what is to some minds a moral and affectionate objection. Now this is the state of the case.
"The patriarch is introduced to us as possessing so many camels and oxen, and so forth, and ten children. All these are represented to him by witnesses, to all appearance credible, as dead; and he mourns for his great loss accordingly. Would not a merchant feel to all intents and purposes a ruined man, if he received a clear intelligence from different parts of the world at once that all his ships and warehouses had been destroyed by hurricanes and fire? Faith given, patience follows: and the trial is morally the same, whether the news be true or false.
"Remarkably enough, after the calamitous time is past, when the good man of Uz is discerned as rewarded by heaven for his patience by the double of everything once lost—his children remain the same in number, ten. It seems to me quite possible that neither camels, &c., nor children, really had been killed. Satan might have meant it so, and schemed it; and the singly coming messengers believed it all, as also did the well-enduring Job. But the scriptural word does not go to say that these things happened; but that certain emissaries said they happened. I think the devil missed his mark—that the messengers were scared by some abortive diabolic efforts; and that (with a natural increase of camels, &c., meanwhile) the patriarch's paternal heart was more than compensated at the last by the restoration of his own dear children. They were dead, and are alive again; they were lost, and are found. Like Abraham returning from Mount Calvary with Isaac, it was the resurrection in a figure.
"If to this view objection is made, that, because the boils of Job were real, therefore similarly real must be all his other evils; I reply, that in the one temptation, the suffering was to be mental; in the other, bodily. In the latter case, positive personal pain was the gist of the matter—in the former, the heart might be pierced, and the mind be overwhelmed, without the necessity of any such incurable affliction as the children's deaths amount to. God's mercy may well have allowed the evil one to overreach himself; and when the restoration came, how double was the joy of Job over these ten dear children!
"Again, if any one will urge that, in the common view of the case, Job at the last really has twice as many children as before, for that he has ten old ones in heaven, and ten new ones on earth,—I must, in answer, think that explanation as unsatisfactory to us as the verity of it would have been to Job. Affection, human affection, is not so numerically nor vicariously consoled—and it is, perhaps, worth while here to have thrown out (what I suppose to be) a new view of the case, if only to rescue such wealth as children from the infidel's sneer of being confounded with such wealth as camels. Moreover, such a paternal reward was anteriorly more probable."
CHAPTER XV.
THE CROCK OF GOLD, ETC.
The origin of the "Crock of Gold" is so well given in a preface, written by Mr. Butler of Philadelphia, for his American edition of my works in 1851, that I choose here to reproduce it, as below. Our cousins over the water were characteristically very fond of the "Crock of Gold," and some editions of "Proverbial Philosophy" were published by them as "by the author of the 'Crock of Gold'" on the title-page, whereof I have a copy. Moreover, it was dramatised and acted at "the Boston Museum, Tremont Street"—a playbill which I have announcing the twenty-first representation, November 1, 1845; the writer sent it to me in MS., where it lies among the chaos of my papers. In England it has been issued five times in various forms, and a printed play thereof as adapted by Fitzball, who wrote for Astley's and the like, was acted (without my leave asked or granted) in November 1847, at the City of London Theatre in the East End: I did not stop it, as on a certain private scrutiny I saw that the influence of the play upon its crowded audiences seemed a good one. Unseen and unknown in a private box I noted the touching effect of Grace's Psalm (ch. viii.) and the sobs and tears all over the theatre that accompanied it; so it was a wisdom not to interfere with such wholesome popularity and wholesale good-doing. It was a fair method of preaching the Gospel to the poor, for that crowd was of the humblest.
The "Crock of Gold" has been translated complete as a feuilleton both in French and German by newspapers; and I have copies somewhere,—but I know not who wrote the French, the German authoress having been the Fraulein Von Lagerström.