Correction is indispensable to progress. Without its healthy influence, mistakes would multiply and moral blindness eventually dull one's sensibility to good. The human faculty of reason is one of the most valuable instruments in the corrective work, for through contrast and experience reason instructs mortals wherein mistakes may be rectified and individual thought improved as the first step toward Christianization of daily living.
Through reason, divine instruction may be received and utilized in human experience, and that which seems a heavy and oppressive circumstance is seen in the light of Truth to be a help toward the discernment of the kingdom of heaven. We read that when Job was in the depths of his bitter affliction, Eliphaz said to him (Job 5:17), "Behold, happy is the man whom God correcteth: therefore despise not thou the chastening of the Almighty."
Without his corrective experiences, Job might have remained a merely conventional worshiper of God, according to the limited religious concept of his forefathers. But he was forced to relinquish his false sense of God through the loss of wealth, family, and health. Little by little, through human reason and heavenly revelation, he gained a better concept of God as omniscient and omnipotent. He could finally declare with the assurance of spiritual conviction (42:5), "I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear: but now mine eye seeth thee." This understanding became humanly apparent in the eventual restoration of happiness, health, supply, and companionship.
