good man of Uz is discerned as rewarded by heaven for his patience by
the double of every thing once lost--his children remain the same in
number, ten. It seems to me quite possible that neither camels, &c., nor
children, really had been killed. Satan might have meant it so, and
schemed it; and the singly-coming messengers believed it all, as also
did the well-enduring Job. But the scriptural word does not go to say
that these things happened; but that certain emissaries said they
happened. I think the devil missed his mark: that the messengers were
scared by some abortive diabolic efforts; and that, (with a natural
increase of camels, &c., meanwhile,) the patriarch's paternal heart was
more than compensated at the last, by the restoration of his own dear
children. They were dead, and are alive again; they were lost, and are
found. Like Abraham returning from Mount Calvary with Isaac, it was the
Resurrection in a figure.

If to this view objection is made, that, because the boils of Job were
real, therefore, similarly real must be all his other evils; I reply,
that in the one temptation, the suffering was to be mental; in the
other, bodily. In the latter case, positive, personal pain, was the gist
of the matter: in the former, the heart might be pierced, and the mind
be overwhelmed, without the necessity of any such incurable affliction
as children's deaths amount to. God's mercy may well have allowed the
evil one to overreach himself; and when the restoration came, how double
was the joy of Job over those ten dear children.

Again, if any one will urge that, in the common view of the case, Job at
the last really has twice as many children as before, for that he has
ten old ones in heaven, and ten new ones on earth: I must, in answer,
think that explanation as unsatisfactory to us, as the verity of it
would have been to Job. Affection, human affection, is not so