A CALIFORNIA Sabbath-school sends a request for an explanation of Job 14:21, 22: "His sons come to honor, and he knoweth it not; and they are brought low, but he perceiveth it not of them. But his flesh upon him shall have pain, and his soul within him shall mourn." There is probably no question concerning the twenty-first verse; all understand that to refer to one who is dead. The statement that "his sons come to honor, and he knoweth it not; and they are brought low, but he perceiveth it not of them," agrees perfectly with what we learn of the condition of the dead, in Eccl. 9:5, 6, 10; Ps. 6:5; 115:17; 146:3, 4; Isa. 38:18, etc. We suppose that the difficulty lies in harmonizing with this verse, the statement in the next verse, that "his soul within him shall mourn." People often cite these two verses as proof of the conscious state of the dead, "for how," say they, "could his soul mourn within him, if it was not conscious?" We would answer this by asking, Do the souls of dead men have flesh, and does it suffer pain? The popular idea is that when they "shuffle off this mortal coil," they are only the essence of immateriality. While the twenty-first verse refers to man's condition in death, the first clause of the twenty-second verse shows conclusively that that verse refers to a time when the man is alive and "in the flesh." So there is no difficulty about the matter at all. The chapter simply closes, as it begins, with a view of man's weakness and frailty.