es, had the effect of widening the range of knowledge
of Israel as a nation, and of stirring her up to an ambition to excel
her neighbors in affairs of peace as well as in those of war. Solomon's
peaceful and wise reign, characterized as it was by commercial
prosperity, gave the people both the time and means for cultivating the
arts. In study and in wisdom the king was the leader of his day and
generation. He was learned in political economy, a great king. He was
learned in music and poetry, having composed some of the most beautiful
of the Psalms, such as the second. But in cultivating the fine arts he
did not neglect the physical sciences, for he was a botanist, writing of
all kinds of trees and plants; and he was a natural historian, writing
works on beasts, birds, reptiles, and fishes. It would be most
interesting to see these science primers prepared by Solomon, and
compare them with what we see on the same subjects in our own day. But
the Bible has not preserved them, and they have long centuries ago
passed into oblivion. Solomon's knowledge was not of that shallow sort
which is limited to the sphere of earthly material, "seen things;" for
he was wise with that deeper knowledge which has for its object God and
the human soul, and their natures and movements in their natural
relations. This wisdom is illustrated and handed down to us in his
Proverbs of which we are told he spoke three thousand. A portion of
these is in the Book of Proverbs, the others are lost to us.

In his poetry also was crystallized much of his wisdom. This consisted
of one thousand and five songs, all of which have gone down in the flood
of years, with the exception of the Song of Solomon, which is an
epithalamium, in which pure wedded love is incarnated. It is a sort of
poetry of the family relations, and, therefore, worthy a place in the
sacred canon. Taken literally and read with a pure heart, it is
eminently fitted to spiritualize the family relations. This theory of
this much discussed portion of Solomon's writings by no means shuts out
the more spiritual use of the book, wherein we see in it the Church
represented by the bride and God by the bridegroom.

In Ecclesiastes we have the latest conclusions of Solomon's moral
wisdom. Read in the light of its general scope rather than the dim light
of detached portions, it appears as the confessions of a humbled,
penitent, believing, godly man, who, after piety followed by apostasy,
comes back