God treat men in the present life according to their character? Why does vice so often go unpunished? Job's friends cut the knot by denying the fact. To uphold their side of the question, they misrepresented the general experience of man. Job felt the difficulty, but could not solve it. He was fully conscious of his own integrity, and he could not see why he was visited with such unparalleled sufferings. To the depth of emotion consequent on the discussion of this theological question, the whole compass of Greek poetry, perhaps, supplies no parallel. The wretched fortunes of Edipus or Medea could not possibly create such a conflict.

"My face is red with weeping,.

And on my eyelashes is the shadow of death,
Not for any violence in my hands,

And my prayer is pure;

O earth, cover not my blood,

And let there be no place to hide my cry!"

The eighty-eighth Psalm is a specimen of elegiac painting of inconsolable sorrow, with which but few compositions can be compared. The Lamentations of Jeremiah are remarkable for unaffected pathos, for sorrow delicately expressed and that refuses to be comforted. The passages in Greek poetry which approach nearest to them in pathos are the elegies of Tyrtæus, a scene in Edipus Coloneus, where the blind old man complains to his heart-stricken daughter, and scenes in the Iliad which describe the death of Priam, or the grief of Achilles for Patroclus.

The fifth marked characteristic of Hebrew poetry is sublimity. In the quality of beauty, especially in all which regards the form, Greek poetry has doubtless the advantage. Greece has a finer climate than Palestine. The

country is so situated in the north temperate zone, defended by mountains on its north, interlocked and elegantly variegated by seas and islands, as to produce a temperature cold enough to brace the intellect without benumbing it, and warm enough to call into play the finer affections of the soul, without wasting its energies in a soft effeminacy. All the literary productions of the Greeks, the poetry particularly, bear witness to the purity and elasticity of the atmosphere.

The Greek language, too, is far better fitted for a graceful literature than the Hebrew. It is more flexible, probably, than any other dialect ever spoken by man. It is most exactly fitted to those who were said to be born with a love of beautiful forms and sweet sounds. The love for beauty among the Greeks was cultivated to an extraordinary degree. In an old ode, ascribed to Simonides, the first of the four wishes was to be healthy, the second to be beautiful, the third to be rich honestly, the fourth to be gay and merry with one's friends. Beauty was an excellence which led to fame; every beautiful person sought to be known. Some persons were characterized by a particular name, derived from some beautiful part of the body; e. g. Demetrius Poliorcetes was called, from the beauty of his eyelids, Xapiroßλépapos, on whose lids the Graces dwell. At Sparta, Lesbos, Parrhasia, the women contended for the prize of beauty. The Hebrew has so many gutturals, sibilants, and other harsh letters, as to make the enunciation rather grating and monotonous.

Another important circumstance was, that the Jews were intended to be a religious people, not a commercial or a literary community, but to act as a depositary of the Divine Word. A variety of expedients were adopted to

exclude all articles of luxury and extravagance. The later prophets utter frequent complaints against a voluptuous style of house architecture, music, and living, which was creeping in at Samaria and Jerusalem. It is hardly necessary to say how totally unlike were the Greeks. All things conspired to make them a nation of beautiful artists and highly cultivated poets and scholars; of course, their poetry would possess a grace, a flexibility, a finer texture and outward form, than any Oriental poetry could aspire to.

eur.

But in regard to sublimity the circumstances were dif ferent. Though Palestine is not so beautiful a country as Greece, yet it is better fitted to awaken emotions of grandOne can stand on Lebanon, and over the level bosom of the Mediterranean see the sun setting without an intervening object. The same sun, rising over the wide desert south of Judea, awakens a peculiar class of emotions, with which nothing Grecian can be compared. Tempests, thunder, lightning, have a more terrible commission to perform in Palestine than in Greece.

Again, the Hebrew poets are more entirely the children of nature. They may sometimes offend against what Voltaire or Lord Chesterfield would call good taste. But they are sure to rise higher than the fastidiously cultivated Athenian. Their figures are bolder, the current of their thought more impetuous, their aspirations freer, than would have been possible, if they had been thinking of the laws of harmony or of the canons of taste. The parallelism is pecu. liarly the product of nature. It could rise suddenly into a climax, or array one member against another in the sharpest antithesis, or it would admit of a continued series of the boldest personifications. What made the Greek a beautiful poet, detracted to a certain extent from his lyrical power.

But the great, inestimable advantage for the Hebrew was his religion. He did not look at the course of nature, as the Greek did, through the medium of an inconsistent or ridiculous mythology. The Jewish history was commenced and carried on in a series of stupendous miracles, so varied, so felt or described, as to fix themselves on the imaginative Hebrew to the latest ages. "The ancient Hebrew poetry was animated by those sublime thoughts, which in such purity, power, and consistency are found nowhere else. Their poetry had no other way to become great and unique, than in this sole tendency to the sublime." Almost the first sentence in the Hebrew Bible struck the heathen critic, Longinus, as unmatched for sublimity; yet this is but one of a thousand with which that Bible abounds. By universal consent, the passages which are sublimest in the Greek poets, are those which make the nearest approach to the Hebrew delineation of God and his attributes. Yet here the mythology comes in to weaken or confuse the impression. That great passage in Homer, where the gods mingle in the conflict, is injured by the incongruity of representing them as visible and tangible objects, while the warrior-angels who were sent to the aid of the prophet Elisha could not be seen except by a supernatural vision.

35*

IMPORTANCE OF A THOROUGH THEOLOGICAL

EDUCATION.*

ON what mainly does the importance of a thorough and protracted theological education depend? What are the principal grounds on which the propriety of three or four years of study rests?

I. On the extent and difficulty of the subjects included in a course of theological study. The bare statement of this course should seem to be sufficient. It includes in substance an exact knowledge of the meaning of the Bible, an arrangement of its scattered truths into an orderly system, and an acquaintance with the effects which these truths have produced on the human mind and heart in all the countries where they have been made known.

The extent of the subject, and the inherent difficulties of it, may be illustrated in a variety of ways. The Bible is a great and congruous whole. It is eminently characterized by unity of design and symmetry of parts. Yet it is of the most varied and dissimilar contents. It is a series of

* This is one of the Introductory Lectures delivered by Professor Edwards before the three classes of Andover Theological Seminary.