perhaps, too, there were mental tendencies in the
translators themselves which prevented them from adequately apprehending
even the drift and spirit of the composition. The form of the story was
too stringent to allow such tendencies any latitude; but they appear,
from time to time, sufficiently to produce serious confusion. With these
recent assistances, therefore, we propose to say something of the nature
of this extraordinary book--a book of which it is to say little to call
it unequalled of its kind, and which will one day, perhaps, when it is
allowed to stand on its own merits, be seen towering up alone, far 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 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 character. 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 wou