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This Book of Job represents a discussion upon God's providential relations to the world, and shows how the subject perplexed and baffled the minds of men in those early days in which it was written. God, in the book, does not give the required explanations; but, pointing out the marks of His power, wisdom, and goodness, in His natural works, leaves His hearers to the exercise of a pure and simple trust. With reference to the loss of God's presence, over which men mourn in our day — this longing to find God and to come unto His mercy seat, which is so widespread and so unsatisfied — we must not treat it with reproof due only to moral delinquency or religious indifference; but do our best to furnish direction which reason and conscience will approve. Call to mind the circumstances under which men have been thrown into all this doubt and perplexity. Then we shall find it is not that they have been intellectually brought into a position in which it is impossible to believe in Divine communion; but that the special system with which the forms of Divine communion have, during the last few centuries, been associated, has broken down, and left men without a perfect basis for their faith, and without an intellectual justification of the act of Divine communion. If you feel this to be true, if under the sense of the worthlessness of those systems of divinity which your conscience even more than your understanding rejects, you are yet longing for Divine communion, I have now to assert that God is to be found, not through systems of divinity, or processes of logical thought, but by the simple, childlike surrender of the soul to those influences which God, through all the objects of truth, goodness, beauty, and purity, exerts directly on it. The sense of God's presence is obtained through the pure and quiet contemplation of Divine objects. "To seek our divinity merely in books and writings is to seek the living among the dead." It is only of the knowledge of God in His relations to ourselves that I speak. In our knowledge of God two elements are necessarily mingled.

1. There is the feeling which is excited within us when we come preparedly into contact with what is Divine. The soul feels God's presence, however He may be named, and with whatever investiture He may be clothed. But then the understanding interprets the devout feeling Divine objects awaken, by representing God under such forms as its culture enables it to think out. God has appointed many objects through which He makes His revelation directly to the soul. Everything in the natural and moral world, which greatly surpasses man's comprehension or attainments, becomes the medium through which God speaks to the soul, touches its devout feeling, and so reveals Himself. You may say, "It is not feeling I want,, but a justification of my feeling; a reconciliation of my feeling with the facts science, history, and criticism have taught me." Nay, it is feeling, intense, irresistible feeling, of God's presence with us and in us that we need. No thinking can give you back the God you have lost; it is in feeling, the feeling awakened by coming into contact with God, that alone you can find Him. There is, however, one condition — a man must come with a pure heart, a free conscience, and a purpose set to do God's will.

(J. Cranbrook.)

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KJV: Then Job answered and said,

WEB: Then Job answered,