Job 29:1

What do the words "he adds at the beginning of his speech" mean? It is not that he completes his speeches, but he comes back to his starting point, without allowing his adversaries to interrupt him or to begin new arguments. What does he say? I would like to live one month of my old happiness in order to shut your mouth and to show you who I was."One month comparable to a month of my past days." He calls for nothing extraordinary, only to live his past happiness for thirty days and to enjoy that prosperity with which nobody can provide him anymore. Then he describes it through his words. In fact, since it was impossible now [to live his past happiness], he shows it through his words and says what he did and how he lived before. See the piety of the man: he attributes everything to God. In fact, it is impossible that a person deprived of divine help may ever stand.

Moreover Job continued his parable, and said. [ALLEGORICAL INTERPRETATION] For because a parable is a name for a likeness, it plainly appears that through a form of exterior words he speaks mysteries, who with reference to speaking is recorded to have 'taken up a parable.' For when he relates his own circumstances, he is telling all the things that are to come to Holy Church, and through the thing that he himself undergoes he points out what she should undergo. But sometimes he so mixes the words of his own history, that he sounds not of any thing allegorical, while sometimes he so utters his own sorrows as though he were giving utterance in the voice of the sorrowing Church. But in the last part of his discourse, he designates the last time of the Church, when her adversaries, i.e. carnal persons, or heretics and pagans, whom she now busies herself to repress by the authority of wisdom, being set up with unbridled boastfulness, she is obliged to put up with, while derided. Whence in this discourse likewise it is said; But now they that are younger than I have me in derision, whose fathers I would have disdained to put with the dogs of my flock. And the very principle of the arrangement requires that by the last words of blessed Job, the last days of Holy Church should be denoted, when, persecution increasing, she is forced to bear the undisguised voices of heretics, when those motions of their hearts, which they now cover up within the depths of their thoughts, they then disclose in the utterance of error made manifest. For now, as it is said by John, the dragon is imprisoned and held fast in the bottomless pit, because the wickedness of the devil is hidden from sight in their crafty hearts. But, as is there said, the dragon shall be brought forth out of the bottomless pit, because whatsoever is now covered over from fear, then against the Church openly out of the hearts of the wicked is all that serpent's venom brought to light. For now the envenomed feeling hides itself from sight under a flattering tongue, and malevolence of craft as it were covers itself with a kind of bottomless pit of dissembling. Now the Lord, as it is expressed by the voice of the Psalmist, gathereth the waters of the sea as in a skin. For the 'skin' is carnal thinking. So 'the waters of the sea are gathered in a skin,' when the bitterness of a froward mind does not burst forth…