mely that the traditional ideas about the nature of this
religion require to be corrected, and that its sacred books as they
now stand do not accurately represent its history. The Old Testament
literature has suffered in a high degree what seems to be the
predestined fate of every set of sacred books. Old materials and new
are mixed up together in it; many works have been revised by later
editors, and so much changed, that laborious critical processes are
necessary before they can be used by the historian. In forming his
first impressions as to the relations the books bear to each other,
and as to the purport of the whole, the reader is naturally guided by
the order in which he finds them; but the order in which the sacred
books of the Jews stand in the Old Testament was fixed from a
peculiar point of view at a late age in Jewish history, and is in
many respects quite unnatural and misleading. To come to particulars;
the Old Testament as it stands suggests that the Law was the earliest
product of Jewish literature, and that all the details of ritual, as
well as of moral and social duty, were fixed for the Jews at the very
outset of their history; and it suggests that the books of the
prophets were written last. This, till quite recently, was generally
believed to be the case, but by the labours of a series of
illustrious scholars of the Old Testament the conclusion has been
reached, which is now less and less disputed, that the earlier
prophetic books come first in chronological order, and that the law,
which is not all of one piece, but contains a number of codes of
different periods, together with a collection of legends and
traditions drawn from various quarters and subjected to editorial
treatment, did not assume the form in which we have it till after the
exile. The historical books, in which no doubt various ancient pieces
are embodied, were written under the inspiration of prophetic ideas;
and the latest books of all are those which stand in the centre of
the Old Testament in the English Bible; the Psalter, which had been
growing during a long period before it came to contain its present
number of pieces, the books of morals and philosophy, and the book of
Job. Daniel belongs to the period of the Maccabees. The historian,
therefore, starts from the age of the prophets of the eighth century
B.C. The writings of these great men afford a graphic picture of
their time, and an entirely trustworthy account of the mental