urgy 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 m