sense of life, live the eternal life which standeth in the knowledge of the Eternal God.

Such briefly, and in outline, has been the history and the power of the truth that we are justified by faith. Can we wonder that it should have been made the article of a standing or a falling Church? Can we think it strange that it should have been the spring of new energy to churches, nations, and individual men? It may be turned into a dry and hard dogma. It may be used even to make sad the heart of the righteous whom God hath not made sad, but its life is in it yet, as in the substance of a tree which has cast its leaves and seems decayed and withered, and by it, and by it alone, can we win the victory that overcomes the world. Turn, brothers and friends, to that truth, ever old and ever new, and test its power by a living personal experience. If the mists of evil thoughts gather thickly round you, cling to the Hand which is stretched out to you through the darkness. If the doubts and questionings which many count the great evils of our time have obscured your vision of the unseen; if the far greater evils of its cynical selfishness and absorbing Mammon-worship have so tied you to the things temporal that the things eternal seem infinitely distant; if even theology itself has helped to undermine your faith by its companionship with

insincerity and worldliness,-turn yet once again to Him who has said all things are possible to him that believeth, and fall on your knees as in His mighty and peaceful Presence, crying out, as one in like case cried of old, 'Lord, I believe, help thou mine unbelief.'1

1 Mark ix. 23, 24.

APPENDIX.

THE AUTHORSHIP OF THE BOOK

OF JOB.

HIS is not the place for a full inquiry into

THIS

the origin and character of the Book of Job, but I am unwilling to let slip an opportunity for stating briefly the grounds on which I have been led to the conclusion that that wonderful poem came into the literature of Israel through the intercourse with the people of Southern Arabia, of which the visit of the Queen of Sheba was the great representative instance.

(1.) Part of the work I may fairly assume to be already done. The theories which assign the book in question to a comparatively late period, to the time of the Babylonian captivity, or to that of the Persian sovereignty, have been satisfactorily met by Canon Cook (Smith's Dictionary of the Bible, Art. Joв), and M. Renan (Livre de Job, p. xlii.) The allusion to his name in Ezek. xiv. 14, the manifest reproduction of what

1 'Though these three men, Noah, Daniel, and Job were in it, they should deliver but their own souls by their righteousness.'

has the stamp of originality in the poem in the writings of Isaiah (comp. Job xiv. 11, Isaiah xix. 5) and Jeremiah (comp. Job iii. 1-10 and Jeremiah XX. 14-18), the archaic character of thought and language, these are more than sufficient, in M. Renan's judgment, to counterbalance the arguments drawn by Gesenius and others from the presence of real or supposed Chaldaisms, and lead him to fix on a period not later than the reign of Hezekiah as its probable date. Mr. Cook rightly, as I believe, sees in these and other phenomena evidence of a yet more remote antiquity.

(2.) That antiquity has been carried up in a Jewish conjecture (it does not deserve the name. of a tradition), which has almost become current among inferior commentators, to a definite point.

1 It will be well to subjoin the parallel passages referred to :

Job xiv. 11.-'As the waters fail from the sea, and the flood decayeth and drieth up'

Job iii, 3-6.-'Let the day perish wherein I was born, and the night in which it was said, There is a man-child conceived. Let that day be darkness; let not God regard it from above, neither let the light shine upon it. Let darkness and the shadow of death stain it; let a cloud dwell upon it; let the blackness of the day terrify it. As for that night, let darkness seize upon it; let it not be joined unto the days of the year; let it not come into the number of the months.'

Job iii. 11- 'Why died I not from the womb? why did I not give up the ghost when I came out of the belly?'

Isaiah xix. 5.-' And the waters shall fail from the sea, and the river shall be wasted and dried up.'

Jeremiah xx. 14, 15.-' Cursed be the day wherein I was born: let not the day wherein my mother bare me be blessed. Cursed be the man who brought tidings to my father, saying, A man-child is born unto thee, making him very glad.'

Jer. xx. 18-'Wherefore came I forth out of the womb to see labour and sorrow, that my days should be consumed with shame?'

'The book,' it has been said, 'was written by Moses during the forty years in which he sojourned with Jethro in the wilderness. It was prior to the Exodus, and so the absence of any reference to the work and law of Moses is accounted for. It represents the patriarchal worship of which Jethro was a priest. It shows a knowledge of Egypt such as Moses must have acquired.' Admitting that so far there is nothing self-contradictory in the hypothesis, it must yet be said that it is purely conjectural, and in the highest degree improbable. Differences of language, thought, character are all against it. There is not the slightest approximation to a tradition of any value in its favour. There is no trace of the influence of the book in any portion of the Old Testament earlier than the Psalms and Proverbs. It is all but incredible that such a fact would have been passed over, if known, in a life related so fully as that of Moses.

(3.) We cannot, however, ignore the phenomena which were the starting-point of this hypothesis. There is an entire absence of any local Israelite character in the poem. The name of Moses, those even of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are as though they were not. There is no recognition of any distinctively Mosaic institutions, no knowledge of a law written on tables of stone by which God had revealed to man His will, or to any hereditary priesthood to which the power of offering sacrifice exclusively belonged. Of the three possible theories for explaining these facts