"...life is a battle in which the best put their bodies in the front, in which God sends only His holiest into the hail of the arrows of hell."

In a sense this small matter expresses the whole of Job. Professor Dillon analyzes very well the main and obvious idea that it is a protest against that paltry optimism which sees in suffering a mark of sin. But he does not, I think, quite pierce to the further and ultimate point of "Job," which is that the true secret and hope of human life is something much more dark and beautiful than it would be if suffering were a mark of sin. A mere scheme of rewards and punishments would be something much meaner and more mechanical than this exasperating and inspiring life of ours. An automatic scheme of Karma, or "reaping what we sow," would be just as gross and material as sowing beans or reaping barley. It might satisfy mechanicians or modern monists, or theosophists, or cautious financiers, but not brave men. It is no paradox to say that the one thing which would make suffering intolerable would be the thought that it was systematically inflicted upon sinners. The one thing which would make our agony infamous would be the idea that it was deserved. On the other hand, the doctrine which makes it most endurable is exactly the opposite doctrine, that life is a battle in which the best put their bodies in the front, in which God sends only His holiest into the hail of the arrows of hell. In the book of Job is foreshadowed that better doctrine full of a dark chivalry that he that bore the worst that men can suffer was the best that bore the form of man.

-September 9, 1905, The Speaker,