Nor is the winding up of the plot less irreconcileable with his lordship's theory, than the conducting of the argument. If Ezra were the author of the poem, and if his object in writing it were to satisfy the Jews respecting the cessation of the theocratic equal providence; however he might fail in attaining his object (and, according to the bishop's system, he does completely fail), he would at all events have been consistent in the final development of the story. But, supposing such to have been his object, we find him perfectly inconsistent. To exemplify the cessation of an equal providence, the righteous Job ought to have been exhibited as living and dying under an unbroken cloud of affliction: but so far is this from being the case, that we see him finally rewarded for his piety in this world, which is the identical sanction of the ancient Hebrew Theocracy. Thus it is evident, that the poem, even by its very construction, if it have any relation at all to the Hebrew Theocracy, instead of exemplifying and accounting for the cessation of an equal providence, does in truth exemplify and is wholly built upon its continuance.

On these grounds I infer, that Bishop Warburton must have mistaken the very drift of the work itself; and that the point litigated between Job and his friends cannot possibly be, whether temporal prosperity and temporal adversity be, or be not, the infallible signs of a man's piety or impiety. But,

if such cannot be the subject of the poem, the whole theory of its being the composition of Ezra for the instruction of the Jews then no longer governed by an equal providence falls at once to the ground.

II. We may now with advantage proceed to inquire into the true object of this extraordinary work and in such an inquiry we shall be much assisted by recollecting, what I hope has been established on sufficient moral evidence, that the author of it was Moses.

1. The grand drift of all the three Dispensations is the same, though the Mystery of God may be developed in each with different degrees of clearness. Now that drift, as we have seen, is to inculcate the doctrine of reconciliation with God through the agency of a predicted Mediator: a doctrine, which (as Bishop Warburton himself allows) involves of necessity the doctrine of a future state. The great outlines of these important doctrines were known, as we are taught by the highest authority, under the Patriarchal Dispensation: and, since the knowledge of the fathers must have descended to the children, the contemporaries of Moses under the Levitical Dispensation could not have been ignorant of what was confessedly familiar to their not remote ancestors Abraham and Isaac and Jacob.

Yet, though such doctrines had come down to the Israelites from their forefathers in, the way of oral instruction, it was highly expedient,

when a written Law was delivered, that Moses should bear his testimony to them in writing. But this, except in scattered hints, he could not properly do in the Pentateuch: because the very nature of such a composition effectually prevented him. Nothing therefore remained but to produce a distinct work expressly on the subject: in which he might not only set forth the two connected doctrines in question, but might likewise state with precision the very ground on which those two doctrines eventually rest. Now the ground, on which they finally rest, is the sinfulness of man and the impossibility of his being able to justify himself before God. For a conviction of such impossibility teaches man his need of an atoning Mediator, through whom alone he can be reconciled to an all-just Divinity: and a reconciliation to the Divinity involves a repeal of the sentence pronounced upon Adam; or, in other words, a recovery of his lost claim to a life of eternal happiness.

Such then, if I mistake not, is the subject of the book of Job. After the manner of the East which delights in the parable or apologue, Moses takes a real character and a real history as the vehicle of his theological discussion: and, without departing from facts which truly happened, he delivers his instruction with far greater life and spirit than he could have done had he adopted a mere scholastic or didactic form of writing. Nothing could be more judiciously

selected for his purpose than both the character and the history.

(1.) The character was that of a strictly upright and moral man; of one who had not his equal upon earth, of one who feared God and eschewed evil'.

A character of this description was above all others the fittest to employ in personating a man; who with apparent good reason should build upon his own integrity, who thus either wholly or partially should strike at the revealed doctrine of justification and pardon through the atoning Mediator, and who thence by a necessary consequence might be led to a denial that man stood in any need of reconciliation through the promised Seed of the woman. For, if such a character were at length forced to confess his utter vileness and sinfulness in the presence of God, vain-glorious boasting on the part of all others would be effectually excluded: and the doctrine of man's radical corruption, as the true basis on which to build the doctrines of reconciliation and eternal life, would be effectually established.

Hence the whole argument, between Job and his friends, is made to turn upon the hinge; WHETHER A MAN'S OWN RIGHTEOUSNESS COULD, OR COULD NOT, JUSTIFY HIM BEFORE GOD.

Job maintains the affirmative of the question,

1 Job i. 1, 8.

in a temper not much unlike that of St. Paul before his conversion, with real though mistaken sincerity: on this account therefore he is praised at the close of the drama, notwithstanding he is convicted of error and censured by God himself as a person that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge'.

His friends maintain the negative of the question, but in an acrimonious spirit of personal reproach and without the least attempt to point out to him the only true mode of obtaining justification: on both these accounts they are censured as not having spoken of God the thing that is right; and Job, who had confessed the Redeemer even in the midst of his boast of integrity, is directed to pray for them, while they themselves are enjoined to offer up a piacular sacrifice as a practical acknowledgment of their culpable omission'.

Nor was the gentile origin of Job overlooked, in the selection of him by Moses as the hero of his drama. On the contrary, the Hebrew lawgiver studiously availed himself of the circumstance, as peculiarly falling in with his design. The exclusiveness of the Levitical Dispensation might easily, as in fact it did, engender a spirit of uncharitable religious pride, which caused the Israelites to deem themselves the special fa

1

Compare Job xlii. 7. with xxxviii. 2. xl. 2—8. xlii. 1—6. 2 Job xlii. 7, 8.