polity, the obstinate toughness of which has been the perplexity of Gentiles and Christians from the first dawn of its existence; it lingers among ourselves in our Liturgy and in the popular belief; and in spite of the emphatic censure of Him after whose name we call ourselves, is still the instant interpreter for us of any unusual calamity, a potato blight, a famine, or an epidemic:  such vitality is there in a moral faith, though now, at any rate, contradicted by the experience of all mankind, and at issue even with Christianity itself.

At what period in the world’s history misgivings about it began to show themselves it is now impossible to say; it was at the close, probably, of the patriarchal period, when men who really thought must have found it palpably shaking under them.  Indications of such misgivings are to be found in the Psalms, those especially passing under the name of Asaph; and all through Ecclesiastes there breathes a spirit of deepest and saddest scepticism.  But Asaph thrusts his doubts aside, and forces himself back into his old position; and the scepticism of Ecclesiastes is confessedly that of a man who had gone wandering after enjoyment; searching after pleasures—­pleasures of sense and pleasures of intellect—­and who, at last, bears reluctant testimony that, by such methods, no pleasures can be found which will endure; that he had squandered the power which might have been used for better things, and had only strength remaining to tell his own sad tale as a warning to mankind.  There is nothing in Ecclesiastes like the misgivings of a noble nature.  The writer’s own personal happiness had been all for which he had cared; he had failed, as all men gifted as he was gifted are sure to fail, and the lights of heaven had been extinguished by the disappointment with which his own spirit was clouded.

Utterly different from these, both in character and in the lesson which it teaches, is the Book of Job.  Of unknown date, as we said, and unknown authorship, the language impregnated with strange idioms and strange allusions, unjewish in form, and in fiercest hostility with Judaism, it hovers like a meteor over the old Hebrew literature, in it, but not of it, compelling the acknowledgment of itself by its own internal majesty, yet exerting no influence over the minds of the people, never alluded to, and scarcely ever quoted, till at last the light which it had heralded rose up full over the world in Christianity.

The conjectures which have been formed upon the date of it are so various, that they show of themselves on how slight a foundation the best of them must rest.  The language is no guide, for although unquestionably of Hebrew origin, it bears no analogy to any of the other books in the Bible; while, of its external history, nothing is known at all, except that it was received into the Canon at the time of the great synagogue.  Ewald decides, with some confidence, that it belongs to the great prophetic period, and that the writer