r away above all the poetry of the
world. How it found its way into the Canon, smiting as
it does through and through the most deeply-seated
Jewish prejudices, is the chief difficulty about it now;
to be explained only by a traditional acceptance among
the sacred books, dating back from the old times of the
national greatness, when the minds of the people were
hewn in a larger type than was to be found among
the pharisees of the great synagogue. But its authorship,
its date, and its history, are alike a mystery to
us; it existed at the time when the Canon was composed;
and this is all that we know beyond what we
can gather out of the language and the contents of the
poem itself.

Before going further, however, we must make room
for a few remarks of a very general kind. Let it have
been written when it would, it marks a period in which
the religious convictions of thinking men were passing
through a vast crisis; and we shall not understand it
without having before us clearly something of the
conditions which periods of such a kind always and
necessarily exhibit.

The history of religious speculation appears in extreme
outline to have been of the following kind. We
may conceive mankind to have been originally launched
into the universe with no knowledge either of themselves
or of the scene in which they were placed; with
no actual knowledge, but distinguished from the rest
of the creation by a faculty of gaining knowledge;
and first unconsciously, and afterwards consciously and
laboriously, to have commenced that long series of
experience and observation which has accumulated in
thousands of years to what we now see around us.
Limited on all sides by conditions which they must
have felt to be none of their own imposing, and finding
everywhere forces working, over which they had no
control, the fear which they would naturally entertain
of these invisible and mighty agents, assumed, under
the direction of an idea which we may perhaps call
inborn and inherent in human nature, a more generous
character of reverence and awe. The laws of the outer
world, as they discovered them, they regarded as the
decrees, or as the immediate energies of personal beings;
and as knowledge grew up among them, they looked
upon it not as knowledge of nature, but of God, or the
gods. All early paganism appears, on careful examination,
to have arisen out of a consecration of the first
rudiments of physical or speculative science. The
t