triumphs in a loftier sphere; the heights of religious intuition are its own. Infinite expansive power lies hid within those brief sentences that cannot be Woven into periods, or wrought up by articulation to Demosthenic harmonies. The Bible uses facts as a great orator uses them, for persuasion and rebuke, not by way of building a theory. On this ground also we affirm that there is no science in Scripture, and that the religion of Israel was something else than philosophy. The Talmudic Jew, untainted by Western ideas, never strays into problems of How and Whence and Why; he does not exclaim, "Happy the man that has learned the causes of things!" but "O the blessings of him that keepeth the law!" He is utterly unconcerned about causes, and regards only himself and his Creator; these are his "luminous realities," as they were to the greatest religious genius of the nineteenth century. To him the universe, with all its wealth of life and beauty, remains what it was in the Book of Job-a theme for wonder, not for investigation. "Canst thou by searching find out God?" he asks, not without scorn; "Canst thou bind the sweet influences of Pleiades, or loose the bands of Orion?" The law which he reveres is not cosmic law, it is God's will, "Thus saith the Mighty One of Jacob." God is the Revealer, but His commandment runs, "Thou shalt do," not "Thou shalt know." Hebrew natural history, set forth in the last chapters of Job, from which we have been quoting, overleaps all second causes; and so throughout the Bible. "He giveth them neat in due season," or "He maketh the grass to spring up," or "He calleth the stars by their names" such is the science (most true and needful) which contents the Israelite. There is no hint of a search after earthly origins. The six days of creation represent a series of divine 2326

LIVING AGE. VOL. XLIV.

mandates, where Fiat is the first word and the last. Other creators, indeed, are eliminated; Bel and Anu vanish before the face of the Lord; but never a syllable is expended on the process by which things have been drawn from their elements or the stages of their growth.

Yet again, "wisdom" is not the answer to problems of being, as it is with us. The wise man drives at practice; understanding teaches a shrewd morality, as in Proverbs, so whenever any son of Israel instructs the world. His energy (to use the Aristotelean formula) is action, its motive love or hate or acquisition-personal at all times,

though it need not be selfish. When the Kabbala tries to reason after the style of Greeks, it produces a fanciful doctrine of numbers, a guide to mysticism, and a method of attaining union with the Supreme; it is a divine Ars Amandi. Even Spinoza, who dreamt he was following Descartes, looks on philosophy as a way of life; he terms it Ethics, and his One Substance forms the prelude to a code of behavior by which happiness may be found. These are not accidents. In Hellas, the seer yielded place to the "disputer of this world"; but no Socrates has ever appeared among Israelites; none certainly is discoverable in the Old Testament. And if he had risen up to argue and define, the language itself would have cast him out.

Familiar as these distinctions are now, and deeply fixed in German thought since Goethe, while Matthew Arnold, borrowing from Heine, drew out by their means almost a grammar of religious criticism, we still need to apply them, directly and at every turn, to the Bible itself. Granting that, as a literature, it has no European features, we must forbear in the details to construe its prose and poetry by Western rules. The effort of reading a Hebrew volume with Hebrew eyes can

this much as belonging to his profession; and that, in consequence, all his gibes and sarcasms at the expense of the Old Testament recoil on his own head. Of M. Renan, whose feeling for the greatness of the Bible was genuine, and his scholarship on the literary side undeniable, we need not fear to say that he has done some rare things in its honor, especially by insisting on the unique position it holds above the "Sacred Books of the East." The Old Testament yields the quintessence of Oriental literature under a classic form. It has all the modes of Eastern poetry, the tale, the apologue, the proverb, the hymn, the laws and the chronicles, the heroic adventures, the ecstasies and the visions, the pilgrim's chant, the warrior's battle-cry, the meditative exchange of pregnant thought, the romance of love, the elegy on dead friends and desolate citieswhat is there not of all this in its pages? It is the key that opens for us a gallery of nations and is their record. Without the Bible we should never have known Asia. It gave us Egypt before Champollion and Assyria before Layard. It kept alive the name of Elam, which seemed a myth until De Morgan laid bare the dynasties of Susa, and Scheil deciphered the language of Anzan. It has educated Europe to an intimate sense of reality, when Persia, Canaan, Tyre and Sidon are mentioned. And it remembered extinct peoples like the Hittites during the vast ages since their empire fell into oblivion. To sum up all, Hebrew Scripture unfolds the central history of the world.

Moreover, if we put the Old Testament aside, the New is a fragment. Every sentence, at least in spirit, which the latter contains may be derived from the former. Christians brought to the West a Hebraism purged of its imperfections, a Bible that recorded them while prophesying

of some better covenant, and in the Psalms a Book of Common Prayer for mankind. There are those to whom the inclusion of books such as Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Esther, among revealed documents is a rock of offence; and one must grant their difficulties, while transcending them by Bishop Butler's appeal to analogy, to the principle of growth in which the lower stages, because inchoate and imperfect, point to an upward way. "The Hebrew," says De Quincey again, "meagre and sterile as regards the numerical wealth of its ideas, is infinite as regards their power." And why? Because they manifest an infinite personality, whose name unites all times and moments as parts of a scheme of Righteousness. Dominus regnavit, "The Lord is King." And here is the need of an Elder Testament in our Bible, to remind us that once the shadows only were discerned of those good things which we possess sub specle sacramentorum. We, too, are pilgrims under the cloud and journey with the tabernacle. If the New Testament, according to St. Augustine, was latent in the Old, then it is our duty not to cast either from us.

Allegory, as employed by commentators, was a rude instrument of culture, It insisted on the quality of Holy Writ by which relations were opened with future times and distant peoples, and on its universal or Christian meaning, and so far well. But allegory neither attracts nor persuades a generation brought up on scientific methods. Such is the state of the case with which we have to reckon. What we will call prophecy was, indeed, a power and a fact, so full of godlike energy that to it Hebraism owes the sceptre of the world-religion. There never can be another. It is inconceivable that a concrete form, larger than Christianity and absorbing it, will rule over Western civilization, among other grounds,

because the elements of any form whatsoever, free from essential impurity, are already contained in the Gospels. The Incarnation is our "anthropomorphism," since Jesus of Nazareth is "the image of the invisible God, the first-born of every creature."'1o This all-encompassing definition of One who was absolutely real and personal cannot be superseded. And we might boldly say that the Old Testament moves on from a less anthropomorphic conception of the Supreme to a greater, because more human, and so it leads up to Christ. For when the lines of the picture have been completely drawn the Messiah appears, and what is His name but the "Son of Man"? I do not call this allegory; it is the thing that happened. To show in detail how it came to pass, by considering the words of Scripture and the events which throw light on them, can any-. thing be better adapted in our day than literary criticism applied to the original records?

All this, I may be told, lies within the bounds of exegesis, and over exegesis the Church has jurisdiction; nay, more, she has a way of her own in handling Scripture testimonies, viz., the mystical, which differs much from the literary. We must not hold out our hands to the Jewish ferule, making unchristian Rabbis our masters. Have we not a sufficient, because authentic, version of the Hebrew in St. Jerome? What more do we want? Let us be satisfied with our Douay Bible, which no one has ever thought unfaithful to the Vulgate. Why exalt a translation that took its rise in heresy and has proved a most effective instrument in keeping Britons isolated from the Catholic world?

That there is a certain force in arguments like these I should be the last to deny; but they require some distinctions and a more precise consideration, 10 Colossians, 1, 15.

if we would learn what they really involve. The Church has jurisdiction, by virtue of her duty towards the Depositum fidei, over exegesis. Who that is orthodox will question it? Again, her appeal to the ancient Scriptures goes upon a sense of her own, call it mystical or prophetic, as it is, in fact, traditional. Of course, and that sense is justified by the New Testament writers who exemplify it, for "Christ is the end of the law." But when we have said thus much a wide territory is left where critics may expatiate. The general application of Old Testament language and meaning to our Lord as its consummate flower, leaves all but a few passages, comparatively speaking, without particular reference until or unless literary methods come to our aid. No school of exegesis prevails in the Fathers, or in any subsequent time, to the exclusion of another. Names equally great can be arrayed on either side. If the pure mystics boast of Origen and St. Augustine, the literal commentators glory in St. Chrysostom, St. Jerome, and a growing multitude of Catholic divines since the Reformation. Authority leaves us free to pass on with a smile when the African saint draws theological truths out of numbers and figures curiously manipulated; we may feel that his gematria resembles the Jewish Kabbala in being at once intricate and unsubstantial, but the Church will not censure us. St. Gregory the Great has quaint "accommodated" moralizings of a similar valuethe lesson is always sound, the argument belongs to an obsolete school. Literary methods claim, at all events, one advantage, if employed as they ought to be their principles are those of reason exercised upon the actual facts. To this extent criticism partakes of the nature of science and occupies a ground common to all the 11 Romans, X, 4.

Western world. It is forbidden to reject any article of the creed; but it does not make the creed a startingpoint, for otherwise it would no longer be criticism but theology.

And if pure literary treatment of the Bible is legitimate then to get elucidations from Jewish Rabbis can be as little blamed in the scholar of to-day as in St. Jerome. The Hebrew text, edited by their ancestors, has its own merits and defects, but to overlook it is impossible. How the Catholic Church regards it in the main we know from the happy circumstance that Leo X accepted the dedication of the Rabbinic Bible published by Felix Pratensis in 1517 at Venice. The Complutensian Polyglot of 1514 bears witness to the same consideration for the Massoretes. Rome has condemned extravagances and superstitions too often associated with Talmudic studies, but she is not jealous of attention paid to Hebrew, and by the chairs erected in her local universities she encourages the clergy to learn it thoroughly. As the Scriptures recover their place in seminary teaching-which the stress of modern disputes will certainly bring about-an acquaintance with the actual words of Revelation will no longer be the privilege of a few, and those looked upon as somewhat eccentric. Bible-learning demands a knowledge of the Biblical languages. If it were fairly at home among us it would prove a check by its very seriousness upon the unbalanced popular movements, wanting as much in depth as in perspective, that have weakened such an ancient Church as that of France and are working disastrously in other lands. Scripture does not lend itself to vagaries of devotion; it steadies worship, recalls the divine to the sources of his dogma, and adds to preaching an authority not otherwise attainable. Theology was written for experts; the Bible is composed in the

language not of the schools, but of the people.

The people-but what people? Here I come round to the point from which I set out. Every nation requires to be taught Christianity, as on the first Whitsuntide of the New Covenant, in "their own tongue wherein they were born." Shall Holy Scripture be given to them or withheld? To-morrow the elements of education will be universal; literature in our schools is even now winning the upper hand over catechism; and I ask whether the inspired volume is to be a dead letter, sacrificed to Wordsworth and Tennyson at the best, or to current verses on a level with magazine-writing? Literature, says Carlyle, should be a Bible. Excellent, but have we not in the Bible Our grandest literature? Shakespeare cannot teach us religion; the secularist therefore gives prizes to all who have learned As You Like It, and exiles Holy Writ to the topmost shelf of the school library. That sacred word, on which society, in spite of itself, is yet established, now surrenders the guidance of life to poets favored by the local authorities who choose reading-books, to scraps of so-called philosophy culled from everywhere, to little apologues and parables illustrated by oleographs or picture postcards. It is a mad world that deems itself Christian while such things are done. Brought up myself on the Bible as our daily lesson, not at second hand, to me it appears that education has travelled downhill, and is going ever more rapidly towards the deep. I would not put the whole Bible into children's hands; but assuredly neither would I take the whole of it from them.

When I say the Bible I mean its very words, not an account of it by the teacher, not any summaries or arrangements of its incomparable prose, but the stories, prophesies, psalms in their own phrasing, to be known here