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The greatness of the Book of Job, that which won for it from Carlyle the eulogium that it is the finest thing ever written with pen, consists in the clear light it throws upon human trial and its issues. It is a unique manual upon faith, not in a proposition, but in life itself, because life is in the hands of God and represents

"Machinery just meant

To give thy soul its bent,

Try thee, and turn thee forth sufficiently impressed,"

as Browning, with his glorious optimism, has said. It teaches us a faith as deep as life, and makes man a sovereign in the world by inspiring him with an indescribable trust in the order of things. To those who seriously study the drama of Job, nothing becomes more clear than the fact that it would be complete without its ending. Job might have died under his affliction. He might have succumbed after hearing the testimony embodied in my text. He would have passed to his rest a greater, stronger man than he was before his trials came upon him. He would have completed his career, bequeathing a healthier influence to posterity, leaving a more valuable legacy in the world, than he would have bestowed apart from trial. The Bible, with its high and healthy idea of manhood, recognises this fact, and sets it forth with great clearness. When dealing with the goods we come to possess and enjoy, it frequently reminds us that we brought nothing into the world, and will take nothing from it, except character; that the only legacy we can leave, determining its use according to our desires, is the legacy we leave through character. How true this is! We may be born to affluence only to live in idleness. We may amass wealth by toil, but we cannot control its uses among those who come after us. We have no determining influence in the matter. But it is different with the influence we radiate through character. The thoughts we think, the testimony we bear, the influences we exert, give us a hold upon life — a sovereignty therein that death cannot loosen. Browning, with fine spiritual insight, has called the world our university, and has thus signified that from stage to stage of our life we go towards the graduation of the soul. It is a Christian idea enforced by genius. In learning it we achieve the victory of spirit. Our soft and luxuriously materialistic age builds on happiness without that highest good of men and women. In any kind of adversity it cries out, where is God? and voices the cry of the fool. But the world is our university. Christ was crowned on the Cross, and we are all crowned as we share and accept the Cross. It is the condition of triumph. It is only when we are tried that we come forth as gold. Trial plays a large and beneficent part in life. It comes to us all very early.

1. It comes into the life of the young man and the woman just entering the world when their education is completed and their responsibility has begun. Up to the day of their departure from home their parents have fended for them, they have been nourished and protected and helped. They have received all the care bestowed upon them as a matter of course. And when they steer clear of the dear old home, the day which dawns upon them seems bleak and unpropitious. The mother's tenderness is left, the father's advice is eliminated; they enter a world of strangers. They realise that they must depend upon themselves. Clouds gather upon the sky of their imagination, although these may be dispersed by worth. And just because that fact is true, those launched may realise that their new day is making them. Before it has long dawned they may have proved upon the pulses of their experience that they have begun to think, that they know what prudence is, not by reading about it, but by developing the virtue; by trial they know what life is, not by dreaming about it, but by endeavouring it. That experience involves trial, yet it is that which is amply justified in its issue. It gives an air of decision to us. It calls our manhood and womanhood into a new dignity. But darker days follow, which must also be measured according to the standard of a worthy faith. There are, for instance, those days when the old home is broken up, when those at its head are called into the unseen, and a desolation is made around us; when they constitute a fellowship our imagination cannot picture, but our hearts must ever affirm. It is an indescribable loss to have to sacrifice the reverend members of a true home. And yet we are not to be pitied. In such conditions God opens up a new opportunity for us. He teaches us initiative. All the seriousness, all the wisdom, all the tenderness in our natures are evolved. We become ministers to men and women, not by choice, but by necessity. When this experience is granted to men and women, their thoughtful contemporaries remark that while God is making a desolation about them He is at the same time endowing them with grandeur of character. And again the words are verified, "He knoweth the way that I shall take; when He hath tried me, I shall come forth as gold." The trials to which I have alluded are entirely good. It is good that we should have to go out into the world and learn responsibility by fighting for ourselves. It is good that one generation should pass and another inherit the problems of its representatives. The forms of trial which I have noticed so far are altogether good; but there are other forms. Many have to battle with adversity; some have to bear the burden of sickness; others have to experience ingratitude, and yet the issue of these forms of trial is still good rather than evil. We may say so without any shallow optimism. There is benefit in adversity, in whatever form it may reach us. Shakespeare, with his clear insight and large outlook, has said, "Sweet are the uses of adversity." And Seneca has spoken words that deserve to be "written in gold on this point:" No man knows his own strength or valour but by being put to the proof. The pilot is tried in a storm, the soldier in a battle, the rich man knows not how to behave himself in poverty. He that has lived only in popularity and applause knows not how he would bear infamy and reproach. Calamity is the occasion of virtue, and a spur to a great mind. Very many times a calamity turns to our advantage, and great ruins have made way to great glories. Prudence and religion are above accidents, and draw good out of everything. Affliction keeps a man in use and makes him strong, patient and hardy. God loves us with a masculine love and turns us loose to injuries and indignities. He takes delight to see a good and brave man wrestling with evil fortune, and yet keeping himself upon his legs when the whole world is in disorder about him. No man can be happy that does not stand firm against all contingencies, and say to himself in all extremities, 'I should have been content if it might have been so and so, but since it is otherwise determined, God will provide better.'" How wise and strong these words of the Stoic are. It is a stern world in which we live, even although it is kind. The price of free rational life is suffering up to man; and even in humanity itself, through lower to higher natures; while the justification of suffering is progress. "What made you a Skald?" says a king in one of Ibsen's plays, to a poet. "Sorrow, sire," the Skald answered. Adversity only baffles us for the moment, and when we struggle with it, we find that we have been baffled to fight better. All the best men and women of whom we read in former generations, and all the best men and women we know in our own generation, have battled bravely with life, and have gained character in the struggle, have proved, upon the pulses of their experience, the wisdom of Shakespeare's words, that the uses of adversity are sweet. They have no quarrel with life. But there is another form of trial, that which comes to us through sickness, when it seems laid like a kind of fetter upon the mind. Our generation is resonant with the echoes of cheap pessimisms, and perhaps nothing is regarded as justifying these more than human suffering. Why does it exist in the world at all? Where is God? What is the good of life? So we read, so we hear. But the significant thing is that the people who so speak and write are not the sufferers themselves — not even when they have the gift of genius, with its great capacity for suffering. They show to us invariably, how sublime a thing it is to suffer and be strong. Who illustrated this fact better than the late Louis Stevenson, in his brave fight with encroaching death? He of all men had good reason to affirm that this is of all the worst possible world. Yet of this very tendency he writes in one of his inimitable essays: "We are accustomed, in these days, to a great deal of puling over the circumstances in which we are placed. The great refinement of many poetical gentlemen has rendered them practically unfit for the jostling and ugliness of life, and they record their unfitness at a considerable length. Young gentlemen, with three or four hundred a year of private means, look down from a pinnacle of doleful experience, on all the grown and hearty men who have dared to say a good word for life." Stevenson suggests that the pessimists of our day are not the children of sorrow, but rather epicures of their own emotions, who prate of a sorrow which they have not known. Sorrow is silent. Sorrow is a fast of God's own appointing, and when men and women really enter upon it, they can say with Christ, "Thy will be done." They know that God is trying them in order that He may turn them forth as gold. There is the trial of ingratitude. That seems hardest of all to bear. To do good and call forth evil instead of responsive sympathy. To love, but yet in vain: that nearly breaks the heart. So we say. But is it really so? Does it not really make the heart? The late Principal Caird, in his lectures on the fundamental ideas of Christianity, finds in the distinctive Christian doctrines sanction for the thought that "in the nature of God there is a capacity of condescending love, of boundless pity and forgiveness, yea, with reverence be it said, of pain and sorrow and sacrifice for the salvation of finite souls; a capacity which has been and could only be revealed and realised through the sorrow and sin of the world." It is profoundly true, man's need is God's opportunity. And it is true in human as in Divine relations. Those who bare vexed us most, those who have tried us in the hardest sense., have often enabled us to realise ourselves in a way we could not have done had they not crossed our path. And these testimonies are verified in the action of our Lord and His great apostle. It was when the agony of Gethsemane and the bitterness of the Cross were drawing near, when He knew that men had rejected Him, that our Lord said His Father loved Him because He laid down His life. It was of Israel, from which he was an outcast on account of his apostleship, and by whose representatives he was persecuted daily, that Paul said, "I could wish that myself were accursed for my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh, who are Israelites." Under the influence of these testimonies, and in the light of these facts, we learn that even the ingratitude which wounds love, makes man, and enables him to bear witness to that deepest and grandest element in his experience which Shelley recognised when he called him the Pilgrim of Eternity. And that also is growth. Under such experiences man is still tried, that he may come forth as gold. How much we owe to men who have been tried in life, and who have proved worthy under their tests! The lords of literature have been in the crucible of experience. Dante's immortal work is the epic of the Middle Ages, and is full of winged words and seminal thoughts which stimulate our spirits, and fructify in us still. It grew out of the experience of a man of sad, lone spirit, the son of mental pain. The lords of literature have been tried that they might come forth as gold. But these immortals are not the only beings who have been refined and perfected in the crucible of experience. We can find those who have benefited in this way in every walk of life. The picture of the radiant young man or woman full of unspoiled powers, and surrounded by unused opportunities is fascinating. But it pales before the picture of the man or woman fashioned more grandly in the stress of life; and sometimes when, in awful cases, ministrant men and women are needed, people who can say the right word to the anguished and give them peace, or who can lift the suffering out of pain, you shall note that they are those with faces lined with sufferings which are past, and full of peace that has been conquered. These are the final argument, that in the crucible of experience we are tried that we may come forth as gold. They stand round Christ, the Head of our humanity, and augment that river of life which, having its origin in His transcendent sacrifice, streams through our religion, our philosophy, our literature, and our life, and brings the healing of the nations. As we consider them, as the light of their witness falls across our path, faith in life is generated in our hearts. Thus in the power of God we rival nature. The heavens declare God's glory, and the firmament showeth forth His handiwork from season to season. The stars shine in winter and summer, before and after the storm. So they provoke the men and women who tell their number, and who weigh them, to behave. That is the role of the lords of life, and Christ came, and abides among us, that we might assume it and triumph therein. Life should not impoverish but enrich us. Through all its vicissitudes there should be abounding and abiding glory in the firmament of our experience.

(F. A. Russell.)

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KJV: But he knoweth the way that I take: when he hath tried me, I shall come forth as gold.

WEB: But he knows the way that I take. When he has tried me, I shall come forth like gold.