Job's broken voice calls, "O that my grief were thoroughly weighed, and my calamity laid in the balances together. Is my strength the strength of stones, or is my flesh brass? I will speak in the anguish of my spirit; I will complain in the bitterness of my soul. So that my soul chooseth strangling, and death rather than my life. I loathe it; I would not live alway; for my days are vanity. To him that is afflicted, pity should be shewn from his friend." And to this pitiful appeal for considerate judgment, and for a word or look of compassion, another friend finds answer, with cruelty like the touch of winter on an ill-clad child: "If thou wouldst seek unto God betimes, and make thy supplication to the Almighty; if thou wert pure and upright; surely now he would awake for thee, and make the habitation of thy righteousness prosperous." What winter wind is bitter and biting as these words?
Job's friends now are his worst calamities. They are thrusting into his naked and diseased flesh a cruel spear, and into his heart a sword. Are these men clad in steel that they are so impervious to pity? And yet, if we pause to consider, this dramatist has not spoken rashly nor unnaturally; for we can recall that often, often, when the window-panes of a life are smoky with the breath of suffering, just such criticisms as these are offered voluminously. We are hard folks. There seems a strain of cruelty in our blood which sometimes gloats over suffering as at a carnival. Were these men vultures, that wait to watch with joy a wounded soldier die? Of what is our nature builded, that we are cruel as the unreasoning beasts? These harsh friends are voices from our own pitiless hearts, and ought to make us afraid.
There are three friends in number, but there is one voice and two echoes,--three men debating with one moaning sufferer, and each saying the same thing. Had only one of them been present, all the three said had been spoken. These men were poor in ideas; for amongst the three is only one thought, as if they had one sword among them, which betimes each one brandishes. Besides, they have a polemic's pride; they are eager to make out a case, and thirst to prove poor Job a sinner. One of them (it might as well be any other of them) runs on: "The hypocrite's hope shall perish: whose hope shall be cut off, and whose trust shall be a spider's web. Behold, God will not cast away a perfect man; but the dwelling-place of the wicked shall come to naught." This is savage cruelty, pouring nitric-acid into sword-gashes. Nothing moves your plain man; for he delights in making people wince. He is not angry, but natural, and his naturalness is something worse than the choleric man's anger. He is saying: "Ah, Job, see now--comfort, comfort? Why the house of the wicked shall come to naught." And has not Job's house been splintered by the tempest? And this friend of many years is saying, "Hypocrite!" But this word recalls Job to himself. He rises above his pain, scarcely feeling the twinges. His thought is drawn away from his physical calamity, and that is a good anodyne for torture. His character is attacked, and he must run to its succor as he would to the rescue of wife or child. Now Job ceases sobbing, and becomes attorney for himself. He pleads his cause with full knowledge of his own heart. He therefore speaks _ex cathedra_ so far. Job is on the defensive--not against God, but against men. His "tongue is as the pen of a ready writer." Job is himself again. His perturbation is passed as a cloud swims across the sky.
