, and life, and interest, which we cannot
conceive of as possible under such conditions.

The more it is studied, the more the conclusion forces itself upon us
that, let the writer have lived when he would, in his struggle with the
central falsehood of his own people's creed, he must have divorced
himself from them outwardly as well as inwardly; that he travelled away
into the world, and lived long, perhaps all his matured life, in exile.
Everything about the book speaks of a person who had broken free from
the narrow littleness of 'the peculiar people.' The language, as we
said, is full of strange words. The hero of the poem is of strange land
and parentage--a Gentile certainly, not a Jew. The life, the manners,
the customs are of all varieties and places--Egypt, with its river and
its pyramids, is there; the description of mining points to Phoenicia;
the settled life in cities, the nomad Arabs, the wandering caravans, the
heat of the tropics, and the ice of the north, all are foreign to
Canaan, speaking of foreign things and foreign people. No mention, or
hint of mention, is there throughout the poem of Jewish traditions or
Jewish certainties. We look to find the three friends vindicate
themselves, as they so well might have done, by appeals to the fertile
annals of Israel, to the Flood, to the cities of the plain, to the
plagues of Egypt, or the thunders of Sinai. But of all this there is not
a word; they are passed by as if they had no existence; and instead of
them, when witnesses are required for the power of God, we have strange
un-Hebrew stories of the eastern astronomic mythology, the old wars of
the giants, the imprisoned Orion, the wounded dragon, 'the sweet
influences of the seven stars,' and the glittering fragments of the
sea-snake Rahab[J] trailing across the northern sky. Again, God is not
the God of Israel, but the father of mankind; we hear nothing of a
chosen people, nothing of a special revelation, nothing of peculiar
privileges; and in the court of heaven there is a Satan, not the prince
of this world and the enemy of God, but the angel of judgment, the
accusing spirit whose mission was to walk to and fro over the earth, and
carry up to heaven an account of the sins of mankind. We cannot believe
that thoughts of this kind arose out of Jerusalem in the days of Josiah.
In this book, if anywhere, we have the record of some [Greek: aner
polutropos] who, like the old hero of Ithaca,

[Greek:
po