Remember, I pray thee, who ever perished, being innocent? The heart of the matter is now approached. Job is called upon to "remember" the long-established moral axiom, that only evil-doing brings down upon men calamities, and that therefore, where calamities fall, them must be precedent wickedness.
If he does not admit this, he-is challenged to bring forward examples, or even a single example, of suffering innocence. If he does admit it, he is left to apply the axiom to himself. Or where were the righteous cut off?
Was the example of "righteous Abel" (Matthew 23:35) unknown to Eliphaz? And had he really never seen that noblest of all sights, the good man struggling with adversity? One would imagine it impossible to attain old age, in the world wherein we live, without becoming convinced by our own observation that good and evil, prosperity and adversity, are not distributed in this life according to moral desert; but a preconceived notion of what ought to have been seems here, as elsewhere so often in the field of speculation, to have blinded men to the actual facts of the ease, and driven them to invent explanations of the facts, which militated against their theories, of the most absurdly artificial character.
To account for the sufferings of the righteous, the explanation of "secret sins" was introduced, and it was argued that, where affliction seemed to fall on the good man, his goodness was not real goodness—it was a counterfeit, a sham—the fabric of moral excellence, so fair to view, was honeycombed by secret vices, to which the seemingly good man was a prey.
Of course, if the afflictions wore abnormal, extraordinary, then the secret sins must be of a most heinous and horrible kind to deserve such a terrible retribution. This is what Eliphaz hints to be the solution in Job's case.
God has seen his secret sins—he has "set them in the light of his countenance" (Psalms 90:8)—and is punishing them openly. Job's duty is to humble himself before God, to confess, repent, and amend.