The Infinite Being who laid the earth's foundation, "shut in the sea with
doors," whose voice is thunder and whose creatures are all things that
have being, is, we trust, moral and good. But it is His omnipotence that
strikes us most forcibly. Almighty in theory, He is all active in fact,
and nothing that happens in the universe is brought about even indirectly
by any one but Himself. There are no second causes at work, no chance, no
laws of nature, no subordinate agents, nothing that is not the immediate
manifestation of His free will.[4] This is evident to our senses. But
what is equally obvious is that His acts do not tally with His attribute
of goodness, and that no facts known or imaginable can help us to bridge
over the abyss between the infinite justice ascribed to Him and the
crying wrongs that confront us in His universe, whithersoever we turn.[5]
His rule is such a congeries of evils that even the just man often
welcomes death as a release, and Job himself with difficulty overcame the
temptation to end his sufferings by suicide. All the cut-and-dried
explanations of God's conduct offered by His human advocates merely
render the problem more complicated. His professional apologists are
"weavers of lies," and contend for Him "with deception," and, worse than
all else, He Himself has never revealed to His creatures any truth more
soothing than the fact they set out with, that the problem is for ever
insoluble. Wisdom "is hid from the eyes of all living,"[6] and the dead
are in "the land of darkness and of gloom,"[7] whence there is no issue.

The theological views prevalent in the days of the poet, as expounded by
the three friends of Job, instead of suggesting some way out of the
difficulty were in flagrant contradiction with fact. They appealed to the
traditional theory and insisted on having that accepted as the reality.
And it was one of the saddest theories ever invented. Virtue was at best
a mere matter of business, one of the crudest forms of utilitarianism, a
bargain between Jahveh and His creatures. As asceticism in ancient India