ficult to pronounce with certainty. It is a temptation to illuminate the darkness of the times succeeding the Captivity by transferring to them, with a distinguished Strasburg scholar, a large1 part of the Psalms. But the grounds for such a transference, even if they were more solid than they appear to be, are so far from established at present that it would be a needless rashness to attempt it. Instructive as it would be to fix the dates of each of the various Psalms, as of each book in the Bible, there are limits beyond which our ignorance forbids us to venture, and within which we must acquiesce in the warning voice which the ancient Rabbi was reported to have heard, when he attempted to rearrange the Psalter: "Arouse not the Slumberer" that is, "Disturb not David."

But there are other books in discussing which it is allowable to tread with a firmer step, where the sleepers may rightly be awakened, and where, when awakened, they have twice the value and the force which they had when they were confounded indiscriminately with their fellow-slumberers. The date of the composition, or at least of the publication, of the latter portion of the Prophecies of Isaiah - which has been already treated in the second 2 volume of these Lecturesrests on arguments though often assailed yet never shaken; and has, therefore, not been reargued in the

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1 Reuss's Commentary, vol. i. 47- main argument is that drawn from

2 See note to Lecture XL.

Of the objections, in recent works, the only one that touches the

the peculiarities of language, and onthis I have purposely abstained from dwelling.

following pages. The same problem with regard to the Book of Daniel, though more complex, demands at least to be regarded as an open question.1 It must be remembered further that those critics, who are the most determined opponents of the Babylonian date of the Evangelical Prophet and of the Maccabæan date of Daniel, are also upholders of the Pauline origin of the Epistle to the Hebrews, which, by a large majority of scholars in this country, has been totally abandoned. And the same general arguments from mere authority which may be used for attributing the second portion of Isaiah to the age of Hezekiah, and the Book of Daniel to the age of Cyrus, may also be pleaded in the analogous cases of the well-known Psalms of the Captivity and the Alexandrian Book of Wisdom, which were ascribed respectively to David and Solomon, whose authorship of these sacred writings would now be universally deemed to be wholly inadmissible.

II. Turning from the framework of these Lectures to their substance, there are some general reflections which are pressed upon our attention by the peculiarities of this period.

1. It is impossible not to feel that in point of interest the period comprised in the following pages falls below that of the two previous volumes; much below that of the closing years of the history which follow the death of Herod. It is true that the Evangelical Prophet, the Book of Daniel, the two Books of Wisdom are, in some respects, equal, or even superior, to the sacred books 1 See Lectures XLII., XLVIII.

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of the earlier epochs. But as a general rule we are instinctively conscious of a considerable descent in Ezra, Nehemiah, and Esther, in Haggai and Zechariah, even before we reach the books commonly called Apocryphal. The inferiority of style coincides with the inferiority of instruction in the events and characters, which is the natural result of the narrowing of the course of religious life under the changed circumstances of the Return. Israel after the Exile ceased, or almost ceased, to be a nation, and became only a church; and, becoming only a church, it sank at times to the level of a sect. It is a striking example of that degradation which, by an almost universal law, overtakes Religion when, even whilst attaining a purer form, it loses the vivifying and elevating spirit breathed into it by close contact with the great historic and secular influences which act like fresh air on a contracted atmosphere, and are thus the Divine antiseptics against the spiritual corruption of merely ecclesiastical communities. The one demon may be cast out, but seven other demons take possession of the narrow and vacant house.

There is, however, a point of view, from which this period gives an encouragement to a wider and more spiritual side of religious development, such as in the earlier times was lacking. It is the time of "the Con"nection of Sacred and Profane History," not merely in the sense in which the phrase was used by divines of the seventeenth century, as describing the dependence of the Jewish people on foreign powers, but in the larger sense in which it points to the intermin

gling of the ideas of foreign nations, consciously or unconsciously, with Judaism, and to the epoch at which the great teachers of the Israelite race began to infuse into the main current of the world's religion immortal truths which it has never since lost. It is for this reason that I have thought it right to notice, however superficially, the contemporaneous rise or revival of the three great sages of Persia, China, and India.1 And although, in these instances, the connection of the Eastern philosophy and religion with the Jewish history was too dubious and too remote to justify any large digression, it seemed to be necessary, for the sake of preserving the due symmetry of events, to devote a separate lecture to Socrates, as the one Prophet of the Gentile world whose influence on the subsequent course of the spirit of mankind has been most permanent and most incontestable.

2

There are still, it may be feared, some excellent persons, to whom the great Evangelical and Catholic doctrine that Divine Truth is revealed through other than Jewish channels is distasteful and alarming. But in no field has the enlargement of our theological horizon been more apparent than in the contrast which distinguishes the present mode of regarding the founders of the Gentile religions from that which prevailed a century or two centuries ago. No serious writer could now think of applying to Zoroaster the terms “im"postor" and "crafty wretch," which to Dean Pri

1 Lecture XLV.

2 Lecture XLVI. This had in part appeared in the Quarterly Review.

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deaux seemed1 but the natural and inevitable mode of designating a heathen teacher. Here, as elsewhere, it is a consolation to remember that the value of the truths which nourish the better part of our nature depends on their own intrinsic divinity, not on the process by which they reach us. The conviction of our moral responsibility cannot be shaken by any theory respecting the origin of our remote ancestors: the authority of the moral sentiments gains rather than loses in strength by the reflection2 that they are the result of the accumulated experience of the best spirits of the human race; the family bond, "though a conquest won by culture over the rudimentary state of man, and slowly, precariously acquired, has yet become a sure, solid, and sacred part of the constitution "of human nature." In like manner the great truths of the Unity of God, of the Spirituality of Religion, of the substitution of Prayer for animal and vegetable sacrifice, the sense of a superior moral beauty or the strong detestation of moral deformity expressed in the ideas of the Angelic and the Diabolical, above all the inestimable hope of Immortality-all existing in germ during the earlier times, but developed extensively in this epoch come with a still vaster volume of force when we find that they sprang up gradually, and that they belong not merely to the single channel of the Jewish Church, but have floated down the stream after

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1 Prideaux, i. 236.

See the fine passage in Matthew

2 See Grote's Fragments on Moral Arnold's God and the Bible, 145–155. Subjects, 21-26.