Product Synopsis

This historic book may have numerous typos, missing text or index. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. 1906. Not illustrated. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER IX THE SEARCH FOR SPIRITUAL CERTAINTY1 I The book of Job is the third 2 in a trilogy occupied with the question of morals. The first, Proverbs, is eminently practical, asking: What is good -- that is, right-- for me? The second, Ecclesiastes, advances to the theoretical, asking the question which has occupied the philosophers of all ages: What is the Supreme Good? though having this advantage over most other metaphysical works, that it treats the question as one of practical importance. The third volume of the trilogy, Job, lifts the question into the domain of the purely speculative, asking: What is the Absolute Good? But Job has this superiority over other works of speculative philosophy that it finds its question still a practical question, the solution of all problems of human experience depending upon its answer. 11 take pleasure here in owning my debt to Professor Genung for his translation of Job in The Epic of the Inner Life, which in general I have used. I cannot agree with him in his statement of the problem or motive of Job (ibid., p. 23). It seems to me that that was Satan's problem, not Job's. Not the moral possibilities of man, but the moral character of God, is the problem which tortures Job. It appears to me to be a far deeper and more insistent problem than can be formulated, as many others have formulated it, in the words: "Why do the righteous suffer?" That is a part of the question; or rather, the search for its answer opens up a far deeper question. To acknowledge all I owe to other writers, notably Davidson, Ewald, and Cheyne, would be tedious, if it were not impossible. Their teachings have passed into the fiber of my mind. I do not know what of all I have written is theirs, or whether anything at all is mine, unless it be that ide...