CHAPTER II.
THE SECOND CYCLE OF SPEECHES.
(CHAPS. XV.-XXI.)
The three narrow-minded but well-meaning friends have
exhausted their arsenal of arguments. Each with his own
favourite receipt has tried to cure Job of his miserable illusion,
and failed. Now begins a new cycle of speeches, in which
our sympathy is still more with Job than before. His replies
to the three friends ought to have shown them the incompleteness
of their argument and the necessity of discovering
some way of reconciling the elements of truth on both sides.
They can teach him nothing, but the facts of spiritual experience
which he has expounded ought to have taught them
much. But all that they have learned is the impossibility
of bringing Job to self-humiliation by dwelling upon the
Divine attributes. No doubt their excuse lies in the irreverence
of their friend's manner and expressions. It is a part of the
tragedy of Job that the advice which was meant for practical
sympathy only resulted in separating Job for a time both
from God and from his friends. The narrow views of the
latter drove Job to irreverence, and his irreverence deprived
him of the lingering respect of his friends and seemed to
himself at times to cut off the slender chance of a reconciliation
with God. From this point onwards the friends
cease to offer their supposed 'Divine consolations' (xv. 11)—such
as the gracious purpose of God's ways and the corrective
object of affliction (v. 8-27)—and content themselves with
frightening Job by lurid pictures of the wicked man's fate,
leading up, in the third cycle of speeches, to a direct accusation
of Job as a wicked man himself. And yet, strange to
