A False Insinuation Refuted
"Then Satan answered the Lord, and said, Doth Job fear God for naught?" -- Job 1:9
Satan’s insinuation was that Job did not serve God for naught, that wherein he was good or did good he was inspired by a selfish motive.
And now comes Mr. Clarence Darrow, the famous agnostic, in a recent newspaper article, making the same insinuation concerning all godly and good people. According to his agnostic philosophy, "Life has only one purpose, the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain." "The virtues of honesty, ambition, truthfulness, morality, and the others mean nothing in themselves," he tells us. "They are simply the tools which make the attainment of pleasure and the avoidance of pain a little easier." "The wise man is good," says the noted agnostic, "because he has sense enough to realize that if he is otherwise he will have pain instead of pleasure." "Other so-called good men," he says, "seeing the acts of the good man, invest him with a nobility of soul which he does not possess."
If Mr. Darrow’s philosophy is true, it makes our existence, as he himself says, "pretty flat and futile." It takes a better philosophy than Mr. Darrow’s to account for the "nobility of soul" Job displayed in that dark hour when life’s pleasures had vanished and his body was racked with pain, and he cried: "I know my redeemer liveth: though he slay me yet will I trust him." Besides Job, there have been countless others who, under similar conditions, have displayed a nobility of soul sufficient to refute Satan’s and Mr. Darrow’s insinuation that men seek to be good only for the sake of attaining pleasure and avoiding pain.
