ills the religious emotions of
civilized mankind cannot but be an object of pride to the people that
produced it. Stupendous as the literary output of the Jewish people
has been in post-biblical times, the Scriptures stand on a footing of
their own. Throughout the era of the dispersion they have held their
unique position and have exercised a most potent influence on the
Jewish soul. And the modern man taught by Lowth and Herder, and the
modern Jew under the spell of Mendelssohn and the Haskalah, have their
minds open to the aesthetic side of the "Bible as literature."

To the Jew, however, the Scriptures are possessed of an interest
beyond the religious and literary. They are the record of his
achievements in the past when his foot rested firm and steady on
native soil, of a long history full of vicissitudes from the time when
the invaders battled against the kings of Canaan to the days when the
last visionary steeled the nation's endurance in its struggle with the
heathen. They are the charter of Jewish nobility, linking those of the
present to the wanderer from Ur of the Chaldees.

As a finished product the Hebrew Scriptures came after the period of
national independence. When canon-making was in its last stage,
Jerusalem was a heap of ruins. The canon was the supreme effort of
Judaea--throttled by the legions of Rome--withdrawing to its inner
defences. The sword was sheathed and deliverance was looked for from
the clouds. The Scriptures were to teach the Jew conduct and prayer,
and the chidings of the prophets were listened to in a penitential
mood, but also joyfully because of the consolations to which they led.
The canon-makers had an eye to the steadying of a vanquished people
against the enemy without and the foe within. For there arose teachers
who proclaimed that the mission of the Jew was fulfilled: free from
the fetters of a narrow nationalism, of a religion bound up with the
soil, he was now ready to merge his individuality with the large world
when once it accepted that measure of his teaching suited to a wider
humanity. The temple that was made with hands was destroyed, and
another made without hands was building where men might worship in
spirit and truth. The dream was fascinating, the danger of absorption
was acute, because it was dressed up with the trappings of an ideal to
which many believed the Scriptures themselves pointed.

There was a much larger range of writings in Palestine and a still
lar