ick it up in leisure hours and see new
beauties every time he reads it. How many Bible Christians know their
Bible thus?

What a revelation such a study makes! It is an alchemist's touch, turning
many a leaden book into finest gold.

The oldest book, as a whole, in the Bible, is the Song of Songs.
Attributed by later ages to Solomon, it was probably written by some
unknown author, anywhere from the tenth to the eighth century before
Christ.[34] The poem is dramatic in form, though imperfectly constructed
according to our canons. Its scenes shift, and its speakers change with
true dramatic movement. It is the closest approach to the drama preserved
to us in Hebrew literature, whose genius never favored this highly organic
form. There is needed but the usual indication of the _dramatis personae_
to clear the movement of the plot, and to reveal the force and beauty of
the poem.

A maiden, her royal admirer, ladies of the court, the girl's brother and
her shepherd lover, appear and disappear in animated conversation. The
country maiden is wooed away from her shepherd lad by the allurements of a
royal admirer, who employs all the resources of fervid flattery and
passionate persuasion to win her as a new attraction for his harem. He is
foiled, however, by her simple, steadfast loyalty to her absent lover, to
whom she at length returns, triumphant in her virtue. In a corrected
version, the sensuousness of our English translation disappears in the
ordinary richness of Eastern imagery, and the poem becomes a pure picture
of loyal love. It reveals thus the healthy moral tone of Jewish society in
that early age. This sound domestic virtue of the people, which looked
with abhorrence on the licentiousness of the court, becomes all the more
striking in contrast with the polygamous customs of the surrounding
nations. We see the social foundation on which Israel builded such a noble
structure of ethical religion. The people whose literature opens with such
a laud of loyal love might well rise into the pure splendors of a Second
Isaiah.

Such a poem fitly introduces the canon of Scripture; since, into whatever
heights Religion aspires to lift the fabric of civilization, she must lay
its corner-stone in the marriage bond, and rear the church and the state
upon the family.

Perhaps we may also find in this Hebrew Song of Songs that mystic meaning,
not uncommon in Eastern love-songs, at least in later readings of them,
which Edwin Ar