ment; as if with a silent, yet irresistible gravitation -a centripetal force.

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Thy word," says David, "is settled in Heaven;" -it is fixed as the constellations in the firmament; and if we would justly estimate what this undecaying force of the canon of Scripture imports, in relation to the ever-shifting variations of human thought and feeling, and in relation to the fluctuations of national manners and notions, from one fifty years to another, we should take in hand some portion of the Old Testament Scriptures say such a portion as is this sublime Psalm—and trace its exegetical history through the long line of commentators - from the Rabbis, onward to Origen, Tertullian, Basil, Chrysostom, Jerome, Augustine, the Schoolmen, and Bernard of Clairvaux ; then the pre-reformation Romanists; the Reformers, the Jesuits, the Jansenists, the Puritans of England and Scotland, the English Methodists; and so on till we reach these last times of great religious animation, and of little religious depth - times of sedulous exactitude in scholarship, and of feeble consciousness as toward the unseen future and the eternal; — times in which whatever is of boundless dimensions in Holy Scripture has passed beyond our range of vision, while our spectacled eyes are intent upon iotas.*

But the Psalms of David, and of Moses, and of others, shall live on, undamaged, to the times that are next ensuing; and far beyond those times. Our Bibles

* See Note.

shall come into the hands of our sons, and of our grandsons, who, reading Hebrew as correctly as the most learned of their sires have read it, shall do so in a season of religious depth, and of religious conscientiousness, and who, in such a season, shall look back with grief, and shame, and amazement, when they see how nugatory were the difficulties which are making so many among us to stumble, and to fall. Human opinion has its fashion, and it shifts its ground with each generation;- a thirty or forty years is the utmost date of any one clearly definable mood or style of religious feeling and opinion: each of such ephemeral fashions being a departure, upon a radius, from the central authority -the Canon of Scripture, accepted as from God.

But the imperishable fixedness of Holy Scripture first, in a purely literary sense, as an ascertained ancient text, which none may now alter; and next, as the vehicle or depository of the Divine Will toward mankind, does not imply or necessitate, either a superstitious and blind regard to the letter of Scripture, as if it were not human, or an enchainment to the words, as if the Divine element therein contained, and thereby conveyed, might not have been otherwise worded, and diffused among the people in other forms of language than in this one. to which, as a fixed standard, all must in fact return. Not only is the Divine, in Scripture, greater than the human, but it has an intrinsic power and vitality which renders it largely

independent of its embodiment in this or that form of language. There is no version of the Psalms - ancient or modern (or none which comes within the cognizance of a European reader) — which does not competently convey the theology and the ethical majesty, and the juridical grandeur, of the one Psalm that has here been referred to. In no version, even the most faultywhichever that may be does an awakened conscience fail to catch the distant sound of that thunder which -in a day future-shall shake, not the earth only, but heaven. In no such version does the contrite spirit fail to hear in it that message which carries peace to the humble in heart.

If indeed the Hebrew text had perished ages ago say at the time of the breaking up of the Jewish religious state and if, consequently, we could now make an appeal to nothing more authentic than to ancient versions, believed to be, on the whole trustworthy, then the constant tendency toward deflection and aberration, in human opinion, could have received no effective check. In each age, the rise of schemes of opinion sometimes superstitious and fanatical, sometimes philosophical and negative — would have produced successive vitiations of those unauthentic documents, until even these had lost their cohesive principle, and would have ceased to be thought of. This is not our position; and therefore versions and commentaries, some critical and exact, some popular and paraphrastic; comments wise, and comments unwise,

sceptical, or imbecile, may all take their course

may severally win favor for a day, or may retain it for a century: - all are harmless as toward the Rock -the imperishable Hebrew Text, which abides ἀπὸ τοῦ αἰῶνος καὶ ἕως τοῦ αἰῶνος — and until the human

family shall have finished its term of discipline on earth.

CHAPTER III.

ARTIFICIAL STRUCTURE OF THE HEBREW POETRY, AS RELATED TO ITS PURPOSES.

THE ATTEMPT to bring the Poetry of the He

THE

brew Scriptures into metrical analogy with that of Greece and Rome has not been successful. This would demand a better knowledge of the quantity of syllables when the language was spoken, and of the number of syllables in words, and of its rhythm, than is actually possessed by Modern Hebraists. But that a people so pre-eminently musical by constitution should have failed to perceive, or should not have brought under rule, the rhythm of words and sentences could not easily be believed; yet to what extent this was done by them, or on what principles, it would now be hopeless to inquire.

There is, however, a metrical structure, artificial and elaborate, which gives evidence of itself, even in a translation it does not affect the cadence, or musical adjustment of words; but it does affect the choice of words and the structure of sentences. To treat the Hebrew Poetry in any technical sense does not come