The man who reads the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey" with his heart as well as his intelligence must measurably enter into the life which these poems describe and interpret; he must identify himself for the time with the race whose soul and historic character are revealed in epic form as in a great mirror; he must see life from the Greek point of view, and feel life as the Greek felt it.

He must, in a word, go through the process by which the poems were made, as well as feel, comprehend, and enjoy their final perfection.

In like manner the open-hearted and open-minded reader of the Book of Job cannot rest content with that noble poem in the form which it now possesses; the imaginative impulse which even the casual reading of the poem liberates in him sends him behind the finished product to the life of which it was the immortal fruit; he enters into the groping thought of an age which has perished out of all other remembrance; he deals with a problem which is as old as man from the standpoint of men who have left no other record of themselves.

In proportion to the depth of his feeling and the vitality of his imagination he must saturate himself with the rich life of thought, conviction, and emotion, of struggle and aspiration, out of which the greatest of the poems of nature took its rise.

He must, in a word, receive into himself the living material upon which the unknown poet worked.