advance thereby; and their poor wives and children, also all that love and fear the Lord in the land, be bound to praise God, for your honours' Christian compassion and fatherly care in the cause of the innocent, and to pray for the increase of all God's graces and blessings upon your honours for the same."*

Notwithstanding their reiterated applications to those in authority, the victims of persecution obtained no relief, but were detained in prison at least two years longer, till a law could be conveniently made to inflict that punishment upon them, which, no doubt, afforded their enemies peculiar gratification. This new law, passed in 1592, was entitled, "An Act for the punishment of persons obstinately refusing to come to church ;" and denounced on all who refused a most degrading recantation, that they should abjure the realm, and go into perpetual banishment, and if they ever returned without her majesty's license, they should suffer death! If the prisoners had been guilty of any deeds offensive to their persecutors, the offence was committed before the law existed, consequently they stood guiltless. This squeamish distinction, however, was not regarded in the days of Elizabeth; the prisoners, therefore, felt the vengeance of this new legislative enactment. This was one of the severest acts of oppression and cruelty ever made by the representatives of a Protestant country, compelling the subjects, under the heaviest penalties, to make an open profession of the state religion, by a constant attendance on its public service.* This statute was, nevertheless, made to promote the welfare of the Established Church, and to sweep into oblivion all who refused obedience, how conscientiously or scripturally soever they acted. The barbarous statute proved sufficiently efficacious; and the jails were emptied of their groaning inmates, who were swept from their beloved country! At the same time, John Penry, John Greenwood, and Henry Barrow, the first two being ministers, suffered on the gallows. Daniel Studley, Sexio Bellot, and Robert Bowle, were indicted and condemned, but afterwards reprieved, the first being banished, but the two others languished and died in Newgate. This affecting tragedy no doubt afforded high gratification to the bishops, who had committed them, and retained them so long in confinement. This was the method adopted by the right reverend fathers for promoting the welfare of the Church of England; but, was this the method of promoting the welfare of the church of Christ? Were the prelates, in the treatment of these persons, governed by the spirit and policy of Christ, or by the spirit and policy of antichrist?

* Lansdowne MSS. vol. Ixiv. No. 19.

+ Warner's Hist. vol. ii. p. 465.

B. B.

ESSAYS ON THE BOOK OF JOB.—NO. VIII.

BY THE REV. RALPH WARDLAW, D.D., GLASGOW.

(Resumed from page 632.)

THE patriarch's varied afflictions- his behaviour under them-and the refutation, by that behaviour, of the false and malicious charges and insinuations of Satan, have now been considered. But multiplied and overwhelming as his trials have been, we have not even yet seen their full extent. Another still is to visit him. It is the keener that it comes under the guise of friendship; and it is the one which, coming after all the rest, fairly unhinges his mind, and drives him to desperation. Chap. ii. 11—13. "Now when Job's three friends heard of all this evil that was come upon him, they came every one from his own place; Eliphaz the Temanite, and Bildad the Shuhite, and Zophar the Naamathite for they had made an appointment together to come to mourn with him, and to comfort him. And when they lift up their eyes afar off, and knew him not, they lifted up their voices and wept ; and they rent every one his mantle, and sprinkled dust upon their heads toward heaven. So they sat down with him upon the ground seven days and seven nights, and none spake a word unto him: for they saw that his grief was very great."

I shall not take up the reader's time and attention by discussing any conjectures about these friends of Job. A single remark or two as to each shall suffice. "Eliphaz the Temanite." Esau had a son of the name of Eliphaz, and a grandson, by Eliphaz, of the name of Teman. See Gen. xxxvi. 10, 11. And in Idumea there was a city called by the latter name, Teman. See Jer. xlix. 7-20. Eliphaz seems to have been of this line of descent, and of this city. "Bildad the Shuhite." Shuah was one of the sons of Abraham by Keturah, See Gen. xxv. 1, 2. His posterity were numbered among the "children of the East," and were probably also settled in Idumea; certainly in its vicinity. "Zophar the Naamathite." By comparing Jos. xv. 21 and 41, the reader will find one of the cities pertaining to the tribe of Judah, "toward the coast of Edom," of the name of Naamah. It is the only place of the name in Scripture; and, being evidently in the neighbourhood of Idumea, was probably the city of Zophar. In the Septuagint, the patriarch's three friends are represented as having been kings or princes in their respective countries:-but on what ground does not appear. There is nothing in the Book of Job itself that gives us any intimation of their rank or occupations.

The three friends were evidently, in residence, not far from each other. This appears from their "making appointment together" to pay their visit to Job in company.

What inimitable simplicity there is in the account here given of their feelings on the first view of the sufferer! The very sight of him, even from a distance, was indeed enough to move and melt a heart of stone. Think of the contrast between Job as they had formerly known him, and Job as they saw him now. This contrast was not merely in his outward appearance, though that too was tenderly touching

But they had been wont to see him in the midst of his abundance, the wealthy proprietor of "seven thousand sheep, and three thousand camels, and five hundred yoke of oxen, and five hundred she asses, and a very great household, the greatest man of all the men of the East;" a happy and honoured father, with his children about him;—in the full enjoyment of health, and wealth, and domestic felicity, and public honour. And how do they see him now? Seated among the ashes; his hair shorn; his garments rent; pennyless and childless; and his whole frame covered with burning ulcers-inflamed, deformed, loathsome, tormented! They must have had hearts like the nether millstone, had they not been touched to the quick by such a spectacle. They did feel and they expressed their feelings, as the twelfth verse tells us, by the ordinary signs in those countries, of grief and lamentation. The expression, "they knew him not," strongly expresses the completeness of the contrast. They knew it was he; but not from his appearance: that was so altered, that they could not have recognised him.

"Seven days" was the customary mourning for the dead: See Gen. 1. 10.; Ecclesiasticus xxii. 12. There is no necessity, however, for supposing any designed accommodation of the time on the part of the friends to this circumstance. Nor is there the least reason for imagining that during the whole of that time they continued constantly in his presence, never leaving him.

must be left to every reader's conThe reason assigned for their pro"For they saw that his grief was

-This is probably all that is meant; though how frequent and how long were their successive visits, it ception of likelihood to conjecture. longed silence is given in these words very great." I cannot but prefer Mr. Goode's translation, or one to the same effect: "For they saw that the affliction raged sorely." It is quite clear, that at that time Job's grief was not of such a character as to have refused and resisted the tender sympathetic soothings of true religion. The description just before given of his sorrow and his devout submission forbids the supposition: chap i. 20, 21.—ii. 10.

It is possible that some of my readers may have thought me too lenient to Job's wife, and they may now think me too hard upon Job's friends. I must acknowledge, however, that I have never been able to bring myself to a concurrence in the common opinion, that their prolonged silence was entirely the effect of the depth and delicacy of their feelings of condolence; that their lips were sealed by their perceiving his grief to be so intense as not to bear being intruded on, or not to admit of even an attempt to comfort it. I cannot believe this. The circumstances of the case forbid me. I have mentioned one of thesenamely, what is said of the calm and resigned character of the patriarch's sorrow, full of agony as it was. Another is, that no indication, not the slightest, presents itself afterwards, of any thing in the character of these friends at all approaching to this extreme delicacy and tenderness of sensibility, But there is still a third consideration, and one which I think deserving of special attention-the connexion which a just view of the behaviour of the patriarch's friends has with the true explanation of that burst of desperate anguish that breaks forth in the beginning of the third chapter, when "Job opened his mouth and cursed his day." Let me request, then, the following observations to be duly weighed.

1. We know what the principle was, which they actually held, respecting the administration of Divine providence-the principle which forms the basis of all their subsequent reasonings, as wall as of their expostulatory rebukes, admonitions, and revilings of the suffering patriarch. That principle we formerly explained. It was the principle of a regular retributive providence; of a distribution of the good and evil of the present life, so conducted as to form a criterion of character; so that prosperity might be regarded as a proof of innocence, and suffering of guilt, and of guilt—how secret and unknown soever it might be to men -corresponding in real amount, in the eye of the omniscient God, to the amount of suffering.

2. They had previously met together, and made their appointment for paying their visit to Job in company. We cannot doubt, that they had conversed over the subject; and aware, probably, of one another's general views, had been expressing their mutual suspicions and fears, and even, it may be, their confident convictions, that there was something wrong-far wrong; and that they had come to an agreement as to the ground and manner in which they should offer their comfort to him in circumstances so extraordinary. It would not be right, we may conceive them gravely and painfully concluding, to present it at once, unconditionally, without any qualifying if-assuming the uprightness of the sufferer-when their common principles led them to more than a suspicion of the existence of secret evils, unknown crimes, which, though they had escaped human detection, Jehovah was thus visiting with his judicial vengeance.

3. This state of mind, it is hardly necessary to say, was, in the very

highest degree, unfavourable to the unrestrained and melting exercise of the heart's sympathies. It is, in the nature of things, impossible, that we should speak, and look, and act in the same way to a man whom we regard with the suspicion of his sufferings having been occasioned by some fearful but undiscovered offences, which he has been concealing by a hypocritical profession and outward semblance of religion, as we do to one in whose integrity and irreproachable character we retain an unshaken confidence. Nay, it would clearly be wrongvery wrong to impart consolation in the same way, with the same freedom, and the same gentle and soothing tenderness, in the one case as in the other.

4. This being supposed the state of their minds, we cannot wonder at their reluctance to break silence. Nothing could well be more ungracious, or produce a feeling of greater hesitation and embarrassment, than so much as to hint to such a man such a suspicion. They knew well that they had no charge to bring against him in the form of fact; that in this respect everything was against them. They therefore wished and waited for an opportunity to tell their mind; and were, without doubt, often on the point of coming out with it, but still shrunk from the avowal; eyeing each other at times impatiently-who should begin. They felt sympathy, felt it, I shall admit in their behalf, strongly; but their religious principles would not allow of their giving it expression otherwise than on one ground. In order, therefore, to their doing this, they felt it necessary that they should know something of the state of his mind. They were solicitous to have him speak first; that so they might ascertain whether he had any spontaneous confessions to make, in correspondence with their suspicions. Thus they waited, in anxious and distressing embarrassment; their peculiar sentiments and feelings tying them up from free communication.

5. Such being the state of their minds, how stood the mind of Job! In the first place there is every reason, from his intimacy with them, (verse 11) to believe that he previously knew the views entertained by them. Secondly, it is surely far from being an unnatural or forced supposition, that he perceived their perplexity, and that he had more than a shrewd suspicion of its cause. There is, as we all know, a great deal discernible from looks, and gestures, and manner, even when not a syllable is uttered: and when with looks, and gestures, and manner, is associated a previous acquaintance with the peculiar principles of the parties, we can scarcely fail of perceiving something of the state of the thoughts and feelings that are conflicting in their minds.

Now to me it appears, that the discovery, or strong surmise, of the way in which his friends were feeling towards him, constituted, with the exception, perhaps, of the alienation of the wife of his bosom, the acutest pang he had yet experienced; and its acuteness was felt the more sensitively, from its coming after all the rest, when his spirit had