Article September 5, 1914 Issue

From Our Exchanges

with contributions from R. F. Horton

[The Universalist Leader]

The ancient patriarch Job, stripped of all the things that seem good to man, and beating up against the infinite with his insisitent demand for justice and fair dealing, is like those figures which our explorers dig from the ruins of Pompeii, or from the rock sepulchers of the Nile, or from the eternal ice of the poles. Frozen, incinerated, mummied, fixed forever on the spot where he sat that day, a thousand generations come and go, and as they pass this figure every one of them who has eyes to see or ears to hear, or mind to question or heart to understand, will look into his face and think his thoughts again. The same losses, the same sorrows, the same distress that made his problem there, make ours here. Evil besets us as it did him. And as we listen to his story, all the centuries have disappeared, and we sit with Job amid the ashes of our desires.

For this is the immortality of such creations of the literary art, that they fix forever in the persons they portray the immortal and universal problems of existence. This is as far as we can get. We only know that somehow there is a strange, mysterious chord of sympathy which binds the ages all in one, and ties the heart of man to the heart of man, round the whole globe and across the centuries. We only know that whoever touches the deep experiences of life and lifts them to the light where other men can see, plants a beacon on the broad highway which will light the pilgrim soul of man forever, on his way to God. He who can paint in words the incarnate personality of man's eternal brooding, questioning desire, has left an immortal heritage to all coming generations. Job will never die. When our children's children come this way, they will look at him and understand him as we do. He will speak to them as he does to us, out of his great misery, but of his great faith.

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