narrative? Is it to be looked on as a religious fiction? Is it true in its spirit, but unreal in the personages introduced? Is the language in which it is written comparatively modern, or suggestive of a date earlier than that of the Pentateuch? These are only a very few out of a multitude of questions which are discussed in the literature bearing on this book. To the Christian, and to ordinary readers of the Bible, the references made in other portions of Scripture to the book of Job are evidence that it contains the history of a true, historical person, and the narrative of God's ways with him. Such dealings were designed to teach him, and, through him, all who read this book, some of the greatest lessons which any soul can learn the lessons that affliction comes to God's people as fatherly discipline, that our heavenly Father knows our sorrows, that all nature teems with evidences of God's greatness, wisdom, power, goodness, and love, that man is ignorant and sinful, that God is righteous, and that man's place is where Job cast himself, even that of lowliness, conscious sin, and undoubting submission to the will of God. See Ezek. xiv. 14; James v. 11. Subordinate to the high moral and spiritual ends of the book of Job, is the remarkable use here made of appeals to the external world. This assigns special interest to it in a work on biblical natural science. Not only in the magnificent utterances of chapters xxxviii.-xli., but in all the discussions between the man of Uz and his friends, we meet with proof of the remarkably close attention which they had paid to the works of God around them. It seems to have been God's design to make this book the constant protest against those, on the one hand, who are ever labouring to exalt nature into the place of the Creator, and those, on the other hand, who in the blindness of bigotry, and in their ignorance of science, are as diligent in depreciating the study of the works of God, as the former class are in isolating them from the constant control of his personal will and working. It is forgotten by the latter, that we can have but a partial view of the glory of the Redeemer, if we do not see Him as the creator and upholder of all things. In the present condition of religio-scientific thought, and as introductory to our notes on Job, it may be of use to seek an answer to the question-What is nature? The use made of this word in some recent works in the popular literature of science, makes it needful to ask this question. As commonly used, the word nature means the whole external world. In the literature of theology, it is employed to indicate the fruit of creative acts-that which has been brought into being, realized in time; and until a very recent period this was held to be its scientific import also. There are, however, many symptoms of a return to such a use of the word as obtained before the ancient physicists had that import thrust on them which was attached to it by primitive theism. The ancient physicists recognized no distinction between God and nature. Their speculations on the origin of matter and on the phenomena of the external world, never even lingered on the threshold of the recognition of a personal God. When they acknowledged a beginning, they attached self-originating power to nature. In this they have companions in modern thinkers. Not Mr. Emerson only, but names of greater note, might shake hands with Thales. The introduction of a higher view into the study of the external world, is to be traced to the influence of the original revelation which God made of himself to man. This, as in the case of Job, kept its place among the shepherds of Iran. Thence it found its way into Egypt, where its power is seen modifying the degraded animal worship the idolatry of nature-of that country, by associating the animals worshipped with the name of some god. From Egypt it passed into Greece-the country which more than any other has influenced the scientific researches of later times. The association of the theistic idea with the worship of animals and the elements, was, however, the victory of the old superstition over the new thought; and the hypothesis of the eternity of matter was simply the effort of the Greek intellect to get back to the sensualism of the point of original degradation. This purely theistic view of nature came to be the creed of heathenism, and in its period of highest cultivation it led to those remarkable apprehensions of God associated with the names of Socrates and Plato, Seneca and Cicero. Something like blessing followed it, because of the divine source whence it came. But its presence amidst the speculatists in the shaded walks of the Academia, as they groped after that true knowledge never more within the grasp of man in his own right, was only like carven imagery amidst ruins, not even truly beautiful, and not useful at all as to highest ends, because detached from, not built into, the divinely reared temple of truth. Thus, when the revelation made to the Hebrews, and especially when Christianity took a hold on the Western world, the theistic view of nature was everywhere attacked. The demand was made for the recognition of two revelations of God-the one in his works, and the other in his word, without which nature could not be understood. Theism came thus to mean the acknowledgment of God in nature, and the implied denial of the trustworthiness of any other revelation. This view continued to influence the church, as to the use of the word nature and naturalist, till a comparatively recent period. You meet with it even in the apologetical writers of the seventeenth century as a correct form of speech. This," wrote Rogers in his 'Naaman the Syrian,' "is the invention of Satan, that whereas all men will not be profane, nor naturalists, nor epicures, but will be religious, lo, he hath a bait for every fish, and can insinuate himself as well into religion itself as into lusts and pleasures." "Heathen naturalists," says Jackson in his treatise on Christ's Everlasting Priesthood,' "hold better consort with the primitive church concerning the nature of original sin than the Socinians." Whately uses the word in the same way:-" Of those who profess Christianity in a certain non-natural sense, while disbelieving what is commonly understood by that word, there are two principal sects, usually called the Mythic and the Naturalist: both of which arose in Germany (where, however, they are now out of fashion), but which are patronized by some English and American writers. The Mythics represent the whole of the Scripture history as a series of parables, never designed to be believed as literally true, though intended to convey some moral lessons. The Naturalists, on the contrary, maintain the general truth of the history, but explain the miraculous portions of it as natural evils." ("Annot. on Paley," p. 3). We owe the meaning which, until lately, all modern science has attached to the word nature, to the influence of the Scriptures on scientific research. It has been regarded as something brought into being by a creative act—an aggregate of effects, and in no sense a cause a system in connection with which we meet with the action of a multitude of forces, which act not independently but are all under the power of the controlling Creator. The term thus covers the whole field of organic and inorganic being, and by some has been made to include the science of mind itself, on the ground, that as when we consider the lower animals we take into account their instincts, so when we deal with the place which man holds at the top of the zoological scale, and in his structural features possessed of a multitude of points of resemblance to the creatures put under him, we should give a place to the philosophy of mind in any complete scheme of natural science. But this assumes that the intellectual faculties of man differ only in degree from the instincts of the lower animals, and that there may be comparison where there is only strong contrast. Job dwelt in the land of "Uz." In Gen. x. 23, the children of VOL. II. 2 U แ Shem's son Aram, are named "Uz, Hul, Gether, and Mash." Among the descendants of "Seir the Horite," mention is made of "Uz and Aran" (xxxvi. 28). The list of the sons of Shem given at a comparatively recent period in the history of Israel, contains the names of Aram, Uz, Hul, and Gether" (1 Chron. i. 17). In this case, as often occurred, the grandchildren are counted as children. When the "cup of fury" was threatened against the nations, of those who were to drink it Jeremiah mentions "all the kings of the land of Uz" (xxv. 20). The same prophet afterwards says:-"Rejoice and be glad, O daughter of Edom, that dwellest in the land of Uz; the cup shall pass through unto thee" (Lam. iv. 21). These are all the passages bearing on the question of the region in which the land of Uz lay. It has been too hastily assumed that the last passage warrants the inference that it lay in Edom. In Jeremiah xxv., mention is made of the "mingled people" -the offshoots of different tribes which had become located in districts remote from their original seat. In the last-quoted passage, a daughter of Edom had manifestly gone to dwell in the land of Uz, as in aftertimes the daughter of Zion did in Babylonia. Uz was evidently a territory first occupied by a Shemite tribe. The portion of it in which Job dwelt must not necessarily have been near Edom, as has been so often argued. Eliphaz was an Edomite, Bildad most likely a descendant of Abraham in the line of Keturah, and Zophar may have been an Edomite, for Naamah lay on the extreme limit to the south-east of the territory, afterwards assigned to Judah, "towards the coast of Edom" (Josh. xv. 20, 41); but these may have only been wanderers from the place of their first habitation. The references here to the Sabæans and Chaldæans show that Uz lay much farther to the south-east, in the plain of Iran. The names of his friends, however, determine the period about which Job must have lived-that, namely, which intervened between the days of Jacob and the time of Moses. The former date is indicated by the name Eliphaz the Temanite, a descendant of Eliphaz a son of Esau; the latter by the style and language, as well as the aspects of religious thought in the book of Job. Job cursed his day:-"Let the day perish wherein I was born" (iii. 3), were the words which burst passionately from his sorrowstricken heart "Let the stars of the twilight thereof be dark; Let it look for light, but have none; Neither let it see the eyelids of the morning" (ver. 9). The allusions here are very beautiful. He thinks of the gradually darkening twilight as the sun sinks out of sight, and the vapours floating in the atmosphere receive less and less of his light to reflect down on the earth. But, just when all seemed about to be shrouded in darkness, the stars of the evening, one after another, break on the view, and tell the tale again of God's faithfulness. As the darkness deepens, the numbers and the brightness of the stars seem to increase. Let not, he says, the day on which I was born have any such tokens of God's care about it; has he not forsaken me altogether? Of daybreak he speaks as the lifting up of the eyelids of the morning. The appearance of the sun above the eastern horizon, is the full opening of the eye of day. The night was thus to him that which lay in light itself. He now wishes for one day in the revolving year of continued darkness -the day on which he was born. Thus he spake unadvisedly. Eliphaz points out the connection between sin and sorrow (iv. 8)— iniquity is the soil, wickedness the seed, and sorrow the fruitful crop. Eliphaz had no words of genial sympathy for the sorely-stricken Job. He puts him in mind of his ways with others, when it was well with himself. You helped others, why not help yourself? You comforted others; why then, when you so much need it, do you not take comfort to your own soul? You suffer; there must then be good cause for it : "Even as I have seen, they that plow iniquity They may, as the king of beasts, have had strong confidence in themselves that they would never be moved. But this is vain : 66 "The roaring of the lion, and the voice of the fierce lion, And the teeth of the young lions, are broken. The old lion perisheth for lack of prey, The stout lion's whelps are scattered abroad" (ver. 10, 11). "The Lion," Heb. ariyek; see under 1 Sam. xvii. 34. "Fierce lion," shahhal. "Young lion," kephir; see under Psalm xvii. 12. old lion," layish. "The stout lion," lavia. Shahhal means "the roarer.' It occurs other six times. As in the passage under notice, it is translated "fierce lion" in chapters x. 16, xxviii. 8. In the other passages in which it is met with, it is simply rendered "lion" (Ps. xci. 13; Prov. xxvi. 13; Hos. v. 14, xiii. 7). Layish, or the strong beast, is used in two other passages only (Prov. xxx. 30; Isa. xxx. 6). Lavia points to the low growling of the beast. In one passage it is |