Then, too, we are constantly compelled to feel that both in the human and in the natural worlds great forces are at work which we are powerless to withstand; and that if, at times, we are carried by them where we would be, at other times we are carried whither we would not. These forces, which the ancient world impersonated and clothed in divine forms, enter into and control our life in a thousand ways which we can neither foresee nor regulate. Is it wonderful, then, that men, feeling their dependence on them, have sought to master and control them, and have even persuaded themselves that they had acquired a secret and mysterious power over them, so that they could not only read oracles, but affect the course of Nature and give men good fortune or ill?

Science, moreover, has discovered that the same great forces and laws "run" throughout the physical universe, that the heavenly bodies do therefore exert a vast and manifold influence on the earth. Is it not natural, then, that those who are not content with materialistic theories of the universe, should assume that as force implies will, or spirit, so forces may imply spirits; that they should people the whole universe with invisible agents and ministers of God, and infer that the powers and principalities of the unseen universe may be touched by the cries of human infirmity and need, and, like the physical forces of Nature, may be rendered adverse or propitious by the attitude we take up toward them?

It is to such facts and arguments as these that we must attribute the power of astrological superstition in the modern as in the ancient world; and when we take them into the reckoning, no wise man will confi

dently or hastily pronounce that there is absolutely no truth in, or behind, them. In the forms they have commonly assumed they are doubtless untrue and injurious: for, after all, and whatever the powers or forces at work upon him, a man's fate depends on himself and on the attitude he takes towards God, and any belief which lessens the sense of his personal responsibility, or emasculates his will, injures and degrades him. Shakespeare, whose works teem with allusions to the astrological dogmas and mysteries current in his day, saw and rebuked their immorality. In "King Lear" he writes: "This is the excellent foppery of the world, that when we are sick in fortune -often the surfeit of our own behaviour-we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars as if we were villains by necessity, fools by heavenly compulsion, knaves, thieves, and treachers by spherical predominance; drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforced obedience of planetary influence; and all that we are evil in by a divine thrusting on." In the form these superstitions assumed in the age of Job, they were assuredly very questionable, to say the least of them. That by his incantations a man can affect the course of Nature and Providence, and bring good or evil fortune to his neighbours, is an incredible and degrading superstition; but that a man may modify the action of natural forces by a scientific knowledge and use of them, every man will admit; while that by prayer and obedience we may influence the God who holds the universe in the hollow of his hand, and the ministers of God who execute his will, no Christian can well deny.

That Job heartily believed in the superstition of his day, and thought that men could ban and unban days, rouse and allay the Dragon, is probable enough. That men like Balaam, and the magicians of Egypt, had a real power over the forces of nature and the minds of men, is not altogether improbable. But it does not follow because the Poet who has delineated Job used astrological terms and figures that he necessarily accredited the astrological superstition, any more than it follows that Shakespeare believed in it because he is for ever making one or other of his dramatis personæ exclaim,—

"It is the stars,

The stars above us, govern our conditions,"

"The

any more than it follows that we ourselves accept it when we speak of lucky or unlucky days, adverse or propitious influences: or, indeed, any more than, in verse 9, he meant to affirm that the dawn had eyes of flesh, covered with lids of flesh, when he penned the beautiful phrase "eyelids of the dawn.' This phrase is as natural as it is beautiful. long streaming rays of morning light that come from the opening clouds which reveal the sun," have seemed to many imaginative minds like the light of the eyes of day pouring through its opening lids and lashes when it rouses itself from slumber. Thus Sophocles (Antiq. 103) speaks of "the eyelid of the golden day," and from him probably Milton derived the exquisite phrase in his "Lycidas," "Under the opening eyelids of the morn." The figure is so familiar to the Arabs that their poets use the word "eye" as a synonym of "sun," and describe the flashing of the sun's rays as "the twinkling of the eye."

Verse 10.-" The womb that bore me " is literally my womb," i.e. the womb in which I was conceived. Similarly Juvenal (Sat. vi. 124), "Ostenditque tuum, generose Brittanice ventrem."

In the Second Strophe (verses 11-19) Job bewails his misery in not having died as soon as he was born:-demanding, first, why he was cared for and saved from the merciful hands of death (verses II, 12), running over all the chances he had had of escaping the burden of life, and lamenting the mistaken kindness which closed them all against him: and, then (verses 13-19), permitting himself the relief of dwelling on the happy quiet and repose he would have enjoyed had death been granted him. As he pictures to himself the tranquil repose of the dead, his words grow more calm, and subdued and tender; we feel that the man is in love with death, and craves it as the sole good left to him. What, above all, attracts him in it is its restfulness: "There the troublers cease from troubling, the weary find rest; even the prisoner no longer hears the taskmaster's voice, and the slave is at last free from his lord." Exhausted by the excitements of loss, and grief, and never-ending speculations on an inscrutable mystery, he yearns for repose; and, moreover, he has a lord, a taskmaster, though he will not name Him, who holds him in hard bondage.

Verse 12.-The "knees" are those of the father, on whose knees the new-born infant was laid, that he might acknowlege it for his own.

Verse 14.-"Desolate sepulchres," literally, "desolations,"are in all probability rock-tombs, mausoleums,

his travels.

or even pyramids, which, no doubt, Job had seen in The Poet shews, and assumes in his hero, an intimate acquaintance with Egypt, such as, indeed, many both of the patriarchs and of the "men of Solomon" must have possessed.

Of Verse 15 the sense is dubious. Two interpretations have found acceptance. (1) Some understand by the "houses" which the princes, possessed of gold, filled with silver, the graves, or "sepulchres," of the previous verse; and these quote the innumerable instances in which treasures-coins, jewels, ancient works of art wrought in the nobler metalshave been discovered in ancient tombs. (2) Others, and with these I hold, maintain that there is no need of such a forced interpretation of the words; that what Job intends to convey is simply the enormous luxury in which these princes lived before they saw corruption, and his conviction that in the rest of the grave even they were better off than when they revelled in their sumptuous palaces.

Verse 17. The word I have rendered "the troublers" means "the wicked," no doubt, but it is the wicked viewed as unquiet, restless, troubled and troubling. "There lies in the word," says Professor Davidson," the signature of eternal unrest, like the sea, a divine comparison (Isa. lvii. 20),-with a continual wild moan and toss about it, in a fever even when asleep, not always openly destructive, but possessing infinite capacities for tumult and destruction."

In the Third Strophe all his former excitement rushes back on Job, and he breaks out once more