In his "Talks on the Study of Literature," Arlo Bates, in discussing Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg oration, instancing this sentence, "We here highly resolve that those dead shall not have died in vain," says, "The phrase is one of the most superb in American literature, and what makes it so is the word 'highly,' the adverb being the last of which an ordinary mind would have thought in this connection, and yet, once spoken, it is the inevitable and superb word." To all this I agree with eagerness; but submit that, in this phrase from Job, "I only am escaped _alone_ to tell thee," the word "alone" is as magical and wonderful; and I think the author of this drama may well be claimed as poet laureate of that far-off, dateless time.
And the good man's goodness availed him nothing? What are we to think of Job now? Either a good man is afflicted, and perhaps of God, or Job has been a cunning fraud, his life one long hypocrisy, his age a gray deception. Which? Here lies the strategic quality in the drama. The three friends are firmly persuaded that Job is unrighteous and his sin has found him out. His dissimulation, though it has deceived man, has not deceived God. Such their pitiless reasoning; and the more blind they are, the more they argue, as is usual; for in argument, men convince themselves, though they make no other converts. In Job's calamity, all winds blow against him, as with one rowing shoreward on the sea, when tides draw out toward the deep and winds blow a gale off shore out to the night; and they blow against Job, because he is not what he once was. His life, once comedy, glad or wild with laughter according to the day, is now tragedy, with white face and bleeding wounds, and voice a moan, like autumn winds. Alas! great prince, thy tragedy is come! Tragedy; but God did not commission it. This drama does not misrepresent God, as many a poem and many a sufferer do. Satan--this drama says--Satan sent this ruin. God has not seared this man's flesh with the white heats of lightning, nor brought him into penury nor suspicion, nor made his heart widowed. God is dispenser of good, not evil; for while an argument is not to be enforced against punitive justice, seeing justice is a necessity of goodness, yet we are to affirm that the notion of God slaying Job's children (or anybody's children, so far as that runs), or blotting out his prosperity, is obnoxious to reason and to heart. This drama perpetrates no such blunder. Satan sent these disasters; for with him is evil purpose. The very nobility of Job stings him to enmity and madness; for iniquity is his delight, and ruin his vocation and pleasure. A power without man working evil is consonant with history and experience, and to suppose this power a person rather than an influence is as rational as to suppose God not a barren principle, but a Person, fertile in love and might and righteousness. In the drama of Job, God is not smirched. He is not Hurter, but Helper. In "Prometheus Bound," Zeus is tyrant; in Shelley's "Prometheus Unbound," Zeus is tyrant run mad. In Job, God is majesty enthroned; thoughtful, interested, loving; permitting, not administering evil; hearing and heeding a bewildered man's cry, and coming to his rescue, like as some gracious emancipator comes, to break down prison doors and set wronged prisoners free. In Job, God is not aspersed, a thing so easy to do in literature and so often done. Here is no dubious biography, where God is raining disaster instead of mercies. To misrepresent God seems to me a high crime and misdemeanor--nay, _the_ high crime and misdemeanor; because on the righteousness of God hangs the righteousness of the moral system embracing all souls everywhere, and to misconceive or misinterpret God, sins against the highest interests of the world, since life never rises higher than the divinity it conceives and worships. The permissive element in Divine administration is here clearly distinguished. Complex the system is, and not sum-totally intelligible as yet, though we may, and do, get hints of vision, as one catches through the thick ranks of forest-trees occasional glimpses of sky-line, where room is made by a gash in the ranks of woods, and the open looks in like some one standing outside a window with face toward us.