"Then from the dawn it seem'd there came, but faint
As from beyond the limit of the world,
Like the last echo born of a great cry,
Sounds, as if some fair city were one voice
Around a king returning from his wars."
And one of earth's gentlemen was welcomed home to heaven.
XII
The Drama of Job
The sun monopolizes the sky. Stars do not shine by day, not because they have lost their luster, but because the sun owns the heavens, and erases them as the tide erases footprints from the sands. In similar fashion a main truth monopolizes attention to the exclusion of subordinate truths. The Bible's main truth is its spiritual significancy, containing those ethical teachings which have revolutionized this world, and which are to be redemptive in all ages yet to come. The Bible, as God's Book for man's reading and redemption, has proven so amazing as a moral force, illuminating the mind; purifying the heart; freeing and firing the imagination; attuning life itself to melody; peopling history with new ideas; seeding continents with Magna Chartas of personal and political liberties; making for religious toleration; creating a new ideal of manhood and womanhood; presenting, in brief biographical sketches, perfect pictures of such men as the world has seen too few of; and portraying Christ, whose face once seen can never be forgotten, but casts all other faces and figures into shadow, leaving Him solitary, significant, sublime,—this is the Bible. So men have conceived the Scriptures as a magazine of moral might; and the conception has not been amiss. This is the Bible's chief merit and superior function, and this glory has blinded us to lesser glories, which, had they existed in any other literature, would have stung men to surprise, admiration, and delight. "The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam" is a pleasure simply as an expression of sensuous delight set to music. The poem is a bit of careless laughter, ringing glad and free as if it were a child's, and passing suddenly to a child's tears and sobbing. This solitary virtue has breathed into the Rubaiyat life. The Bible is a series of books bound in a single volume, because all relate to a single theme: history, biography, letters, proverbial philosophy, pure idyls, lofty eloquence, elegiac poetry, ethics, legal codes, memorabilia, commentaries on campaigns more influential on the world's destiny than Caesar's, epic poetry, lyrics, and a sublime drama. The Bible is not a book, but a library; not a literary effort, but a literature. It sums up the literature of the Hebrew race, aside from which that race produced nothing literary worthy of perpetuation. One lofty theme stung them to genius, their mission and literature converging in Christ and there ending. The Bible as literature marks the book as unique as a literary fact as it is as a religious fact; in either, standing solitary. That lovers of literature have passed these surprising literary merits by with comparative inattention is attributable, doubtless, to the over-shadowing moral majesty of the volume. The larger obscured the lesser glory. But, after all, can we feel other than shame in recalling how our college curricula contain the masterpieces of Greek, Latin, English, and German literature, and find no niche for the Bible, superior to all in moral elevation and literary charm and inspiration? "Ruth" is easily the superior of "Paul and Virginia" or "Vicar of Wakefield." "Lamentations" is as noble an elegy as sorrow has set to words; the Gospels are not surpassed by Boswell's "Johnson" in power of recreating the subject of the biography; the Psalms sing themselves without aid of harp or organ; "The Acts" is a history taking rank with Thucydides; and Job is the sublimest drama ever penned. If these encomiums are high, they must not be deemed extravagant, rather the necessary eulogy of truth.
What are the sublimest poems of universal literature? Let this stand as a tentative reply: Aeschylus's "Prometheus Bound," Dante's "Divine Comedy," Shakespeare's "Hamlet," Milton's "Paradise Lost," and Job, author unknown. To rank as a sublime production, theme and treatment must both be sublime, and the poem must be of dignified length. Prometheus has a Titan for subject; has magnanimity for occasion; has suffering, on account of his philanthropy, as tragic element; and the barren crags of Caucasus as theater; and the style is the loftiest of Aeschylus, sublimest of Greek dramatists. Perhaps "Oedipus Coloneus" is nearest approach among Greek tragedies to the elevation of "Prometheus Bound," and Shelley's "Prometheus Unbound" has much of the Greek sublimity and more than the Greek frigidity. Dante is nearest neighbor to Aeschylus, though fifteen hundred years removed, and the "Divine Comedy" has all elements of sublimity. The time is eternal. The havoc of sin, the might of Christ, the freedom of the human spirit, the righteousness of God, the fate of souls, are materials out of which sublimer cathedral should be built than ever Gothic Christians wrought in poetry of stone. "Hamlet" is the sublimity of a soul fighting, single-handed, with innumerable foes, and dying—slain, but undefeated. "Paradise Lost" might easily be mistaken for the deep organ music of a stormy ocean, so matchless and sublime the melody. In theme, epic; in treatment, epic; in termination, tragic,—which melts into holy hope and radiant promise as a night of storm and fearful darkness melts into the light and glory of the dawn and sunrise when the sky is fair. I can hear and see this blind old Puritan, chanting the drama of a lost cause as a David lamenting for his Absalom dead. Milton is sublime in history, misfortune, range of ideas, warrior strength, and prowess to fight and die undaunted. Not even his darkness makes him sob more than a moment. A rebellion in heaven, a war in consequence; the flaming legions of the skies led by Christ, God's Son; a conflict, whose clangor fills the vaulted skies in heaven with reverberating thunders, ending in defeat for evil which makes all Waterloos insignificant; the fall of Satanic legions from the thrones which once were theirs, when, with dolorous cry, they stumbled into hell; the counterplot of Lucifer; the voyage across the wastes "of chaos and old night;" the horrid birth of Sin; the apocalypse of Sin and Death in Eden; and the Promise, whose pierced hand, held out, saved from utter ruin those who,
"Hand in hand with wandering steps and slow,
Through Eden took their solitary way."
Musician, instrument, and oratorio,—all sublime. "Last named, though first written, is the drama of Job, in which all things conspire to lift the argument into sublimity. Are seas in tempests sublime? What are they, matched with Job's stormy soul? Are thunders reverberating among mountains sublime? What are they when God's voice makes interrogatory? But above all, God walks into the drama as his right is to walk into human life; and God's appearance, whether at Sinai or Calvary, or in the weary watches of some heart's night of pain, makes mountain and hour and heart sublime.
Thomas Carlyle once, reading at prayers in a friend's house from the Book of Job, became oblivious to surroundings, and read on and on, till one by one the listeners arose and slipped out in silence, leaving the rapt reader alone, he holding on his solitary way until the last strophe fell from the reader's lips; nor can we wonder at him, for such must be the disposition of every thoughtful peruser of Job. As we will not care to lay Hamlet down till Fortinbras is taking Hamlet, with regal honors, from the scene, so we cling to Job till we see light break through the clouds, and the storm vanish, and the thunder cease.
Job is a prince, old, rich, fortunate, benevolent, and good. Life has dealt kindly with him, and looking at his face you would not, from his wrinkles, guess his years. The great honor him; the good trust him; the poor, in his bounty find plenty; no blessing has failed him, so that his name is a synonym of good fortune,—such a man is chief person of this drama, written by some unknown genius. Singular, is it not, that this voice, from an antiquity remoter than literature can duplicate, should be anonymous? Not all commodities have the firm's name upon them. Some of the world's noblest thoughts are entailed on the generations, they not knowing whence they sprang. He who speaks a great word is not always conscious it is great. We are often hidden from ourselves. But our joy is, some nameless poet has made Job chief actor in the drama of a good man's life. "The steps of a good man are ordered of the Lord," the Scriptures say, and such a man was Job; and the theme of this drama is, how shall a good man behave under circumstances ruinously perverse, and what shall be his fate? The theme has rare attraction, and appeals to us as a home message, dear to our heart as a fond word left us by a departing friend.