there must always come a time when we are bound to go back to first credentials, to place ourselves in the position of the people to whom the Book originally came. Why has this psalmist, prophet or preacher survived, whilst other contemporary voices have died into silence ?

In old times there was an importance attributed to a statement committed to writing. Our modern system of scribbling a note at any moment, upon any subject, together with the multiplication of copies, has robbed the written word of the awe which belonged to an age of deliberate writing. Far back in history we find it enshrined in a king's palace, preserved on obelisk or temple. The warning to Belshazzar ran naturally along the cornice of the hall of festivities. For probably much else of a pious and hortatory character had already found place there. The Babylonian not only burnt his sacred writings into brick, but he preserved in the public library of the city important commercial

contracts.

In ages when little was committed to writing, the tablets of the memory were trusted more fully than with us who relieve ourselves of mental attention, as soon as possible, by mechanical assistance. The prophet or the seer would have to obtain considerable popularity before his writing was committed to a permanent record. It was only the greatly honoured whose literary works were preserved amongst the scrolls of a library. From this selection a few survived, to be re-copied into a literary immortality. There are references in the Bible itself to books of importance to their contemporaries

which are lost to us. Similar misfortune has overtaken much of the classic writing of antiquity, though now and again the archæologist recovers from an Eastern monastery, or from an Egyptian tomb, some treasure of the past. The prophets were not solitary peaks, cloud-capped and awful, rising high above the plain of human experience. They were part of a mountain range foreshortened to the spectator, who in order to identify them required to have one and another distinguished amongst the maze of heights. To their contemporaries they rarely stand out pre-eminently. "His mother and His brethren, are they not with us?" is repeatedly spoken of every new teacher. In our own time, it takes years to recognise the new poet who will rank at last amongst the immortals. Wordsworth was one amongst others whom contemporary judgment regarded as little inferior to him. Yet where are those others to-day? Perspective is one of the most important conditions of reputation. There are men living to whom Tennyson was once a minor poet, a lark fluttering above the grasses, not soaring into the heart of the blue; and Browning was left to the discipleship of a few enamoured followers. Amongst the many prophets of Israel there were the fashionable preachers of their day, appealing by their ready qualities to an instant appreciation. They had their reward; whilst the great thinkers and reformers roamed the by-ways sometimes noticed, often shunned. So it has happened that a book, now sacred, has not reached that seat of authority, a place in the canon, until its author, despised and rejected, had passed beyond

human praise or blame. Such delay, at any rate, secured fairer judgment; it cleared the court of personal bias. The generation that pronounced the verdict dealt with the merit of the work alone. Whatever might have been the reputation of the intellectual and literary class, the prophets could never have laid hold upon the affections of the The popular verdict nation if the rough judgment of

in the Canon. the common people had not really determined their authority. When a popular movement became irresistible, Rabbi and Scribe would declare the work to be of God.

No doubt the historical parts of the Old Testament owe their present form to revision and editorship. But we must assume that if they had not corresponded in their main features to the history which the Jew traditionally carried in his mind there would have grown up a second Bible, and we should have had the two versions side by side, the one in popular form, the other for the learned classes. It is evident that the oral tradition corresponded to the written tradition, and the fact that no other version was called for contributes to establish the authenticity of the Hebrew canon in the popular estimate. But if the historical accuracy of the recorded movements of the Hebrew race from Abraham downwards were established, the moral influence attributed to them by the elect people need not govern the conduct of to-day. The narrowness of the teaching, the provincial character of the ideals, repel the modern thinker. The strange interweaving of spiritual emotion with doubtful morality diminishes its

ethical value for him. He acknowledges the archæological interest, but resists the theological authority.

The testimony of monumental discoveries has considerably modified the criticism directed against the age and accuracy of Hebrew scriptures. The discovery of phonetic writing at an earlier date than formerly accepted, the identification of the common tongue of the Canaanite and the Jew, prove that we are not bound to hieroglyphic or ideographic systems at the time of the Exodus or earlier. The story of a desert-wandering of a nation of escaped slaves was a tradition for which there was no demand, and if doubtful it would have been corrected by some other competing tradition. The Maori has his annals of pilgrimage from island to island across the Pacific when he emigrated from the original source of his race. There is no reason to doubt the truth of this tradition, though he had neither a Moses nor a Pentateuch to register an Exodus, which must at least have dated back many centuries.

Protestantism owes much of its robust character to the Old Testament. The spirit and temper of the Puritan was more in accord Relation of the with that of the Jew than with Old Testament to that of the Gentile Christian. Christianity. The ferocity in battle of those desert-bred clans, their harsh justice, their cruelty to aliens, is reproduced in the religious wars which broke out upon the Reformation. Wild chants of victory, bitter curses on enemies, break like thunder across the solemn music of the Psalms.

They cannot be said to be sympathetic with the spirit of Christianity. Yet if we were to deprive ourselves of the contribution which the Old Testament has made to our religious life we should be at once sensible of a loss in warmth and colour. History is too pale a shadow moving through a dim past to enable us to learn the lesson of an intelligent Power to be discovered in the march of armies and in the fate of empires. But in this handful of Jews we may compare the passionate belief of the people in their own God and destiny with the circumstances of their national life. The theory of the theocracy did not permit an extension of empire deep into neighbouring nations. At the most the Jews might keep in vassalage the hated Edom and Moab, or cast their outposts as far as Damascus and Tyre. To go farther would have been to raise a problem of empire too vast for them. They might have been overpowered by the strange blood and stranger gods of their new confederates. They were therefore restricted to their little mountain country, bounded by the wilderness on the south, without a port of any value for commercial expansion until they reached the gulf of Akabar. They lay just within the tract of contending armies, a buffer state between Egypt and the empires of the Tigris and of the Euphrates. They could not expect liberty to work out their own political history, or to escape from becoming the victims or the tools of one or other of their huge neighbours. Their story reads like the anecdote of some confiding bird which raises its young upon a battlefield, or plants its nest upon the axle of a