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see it between Abraham and Sara. Presently this same Hebrew people, with that aptitude which, as I say, characterised it for being profoundly impressed by ideas of moral order, placed in the Decalogue the marriage-tie under the express and solemn sanction of the Eternal, by the Seventh Commandment: Thou shalt not commit adultery.-God and the Bible.

PERSISTENCY OF ISRAEL'S FAITH.

MOST remarkable, indeed, is the inward travail to which, in the six hundred years that followed the age of David and Solomon, the many and rude shocks befalling Israel's fundamental idea, Righteousness tendeth to life, gave occasion. 'Wherefore do the wicked live,' asks Job, 'become old, yea, are mighty in power? their houses are safe from fear, neither is the rod of God upon them?' Job himself is righteous, and yet: 'On mine eyelids is the shadow of death, not for any injustice in mine hands.' All through the Book of Job, the question, how this can be, is over and over again asked and never answered; inadequate solutions are offered and repelled, but an adequate solution is never reached. The only solution reached is that of silence before the insoluble: 'I will lay mine hand upon my mouth.' The two perceptions, Righteousness tendeth to life, and, The ungodly prosper in the world, are left confronting one another like Kantian antinomies. 'The earth is given under the hand of the

Persistency of Israel's Faith.

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wicked!' and yet : 'The counsel of the wicked is far from me; God rewardeth him, and he shall know it!' And this last, the original perception, remains indestructible. The Book of Ecclesiastes has been called sceptical, epicurean; it is certainly without the glow and hope which animate the Bible in general. It belongs, probably, to the fourth century before Christ, to the latter and worse days of the Persian power; with difficulties pressing the Jewish community on all sides, with a Persian governor lording it in Jerusalem, with resources light and taxes heavy, with the cancer of poverty eating into the mass of the people, with the rich estranged from the poor and from the national traditions, with the priesthood slack, insincere, and worthless. Composed under such circumstances, the book has been said, and with justice, to breathe resignation at the grave of Israel. Its author sees 'the tears of the oppressed, and they had no comforter, and on the side of their oppressors there was power; wherefore I praised the dead which are already dead more than the living which are yet alive.' He sees all things come alike to all, there is one event to the righteous and to the wicked.' Attempts at a philosophic indifference appear, at a sceptical suspension of judgment, at an easy ne quid nimis: 'Be not righteous overmuch, neither make thyself overwise! why shouldst thou destroy thyself?' Vain attempts, even at a moment which favoured them! shows of scepticism, vanishing as soon as uttered before

the intractable conscientiousness of Israel! For the Preacher makes answer against himself: 'Though a sinner do evil a hundred times and his days be prolonged, yet surely I know that it shall be well with them that fear God; but it shall not be well with the wicked, because he feareth not before God.'

Malachi, probably almost contemporary with the Preacher, felt the pressure of the same circumstances, had the same occasions of despondency. All around him people were saying: 'Every one that doeth evil is good in the sight of the Eternal, and he delighteth in them; where is the God of judgment? it is vain to serve God, and what profit is it that we have kept his ordinance?' What a change from the clear certitude of the golden age: As the whirlwind passeth, so is the wicked no more; but the righteous is an everlasting foundation!' But yet, with all the certitude of this happier past, Malachi answers on behalf of the Eternal: 'Unto you that fear my name shall the sun of righteousness arise with healing in his wings!'-Literature and Dogma.

'COGITAVI VIAS MEAS,

Cogitavi vias meas, et converti pedes meos in testimonia Tua; I called mine own ways to remembrance, and turned my feet unto Thy testimonies.' Israel is the great, standing, unsilenceable, unshaken witness to the necessity of minding one's ways, of conduct. And what

ever else he may have done, or not done, he can assuredly plead Cogitavi vias meas. 'Sacrifices mark a conception in which morality has no part,' says one of my critics; 'sacrifices existed in Israel ab origine.' Even in his historic time there hung, we are told, about Israel traces of an inchoate and dark stage, remains of an early 'conception of God as an unseen but powerful foe, whose enmity might be averted by the death of victims.' It may have been so. But still, Israel can answer, still, all hampered with these survivals of a lower world, cogitavi vias meas! "Though righteousness,' pursues our critic, 'entered largely into Israel's conception of the Eternal, yet that conception contained much that conflicts with righteousness. The God of Israel often appears as more patriotic than righteous; blesses Jael, for instance, for the treacherous murder of Sisera.' 'Israel's God,' this objector goes on, is a magnified and nonnatural man, not impassive and uniform like a law of nature, but angry and then repenting him, jealous and then soothed.' True, Israel may again answer; but nevertheless, with all this mixture, and with this crude. anthropomorphic conception of God, cogitavi vias meas! 'Israel's religion deals in ecstasy, enthusiasm, evocations of the dead.' Cogitavi vias meas! 'The current idea of righteousness in Israel was largely made up of ceremonial observances.' Cogitavi vias meas! Finally, in spite of all this thinking upon his ways, Israel misdirected

them. 'The Bible,' cries our anti-Israelitish critic, 'failed to turn the hearts of those to whom it was addressed; what a commentary is afforded by Israel's history on the value of the Bible!' True, as Israel managed his profession of faith, he did not walk by it aright, it did not save him;-but did he on that account drop it? Cogitavi, cogitavi vias meas 1-God and the Bible.

'ABERGLAUBE.

IN one sense, the lofty Messianic ideas of 'the great and notable day of the Eternal,' 'the consolation of Israel,' 'the restitution of all things,' are even more important than the solid but humbler idea, righteousness tendeth to life, out of which they arose. In another sense they are much less important. They are more important, because they are the development of this idea and prove its strength. It might have been crushed and baffled by the falsification events seemed to delight in giving to it; that, instead of being crushed and baffled, it took this magnificent flight, shows its innate power. Moreover, the Messianic ideas do in a wonderful manner attract emotion to the ideas of conduct and morality, attract it to them and combine it with them. On the other hand, the idea that righteousness tendeth to life has a firm, experimental ground, which the Messianic ideas have not. And the day comes when the possession of such a ground is invaluable.