ion nearly three quarters of a century after
him; but his greatest service in the field of biblical study was his
work, at once profound and brilliant, The Spirit of Hebrew Poetry. In
this field he eclipsed Bishop Lowth. Among other things of importance,
he showed that the Psalms were by different authors and of different
periods--the bloom of a great poetic literature.

Until his time no one had so clearly done justice to their sublimity and
beauty; but most striking of all was his discussion of Solomon's Song.
For over twenty centuries it had been customary to attribute to it
mystical meanings. If here and there some man saw the truth, he was
careful, like Aben Ezra, to speak with bated breath.

The penalty for any more honest interpretation was seen, among
Protestants, when Calvin and Beza persecuted Castellio, covered him with
obloquy, and finally drove him to starvation and death, for throwing
light upon the real character of the Song of Songs; and among Catholics
it was seen when Philip II allowed the pious and gifted Luis de Leon,
for a similar offence, to be thrown into a dungeon of the Inquisition
and kept there for five years, until his health was utterly shattered
and his spirit so broken that he consented to publish a new commentary
on the song, "as theological and obscure as the most orthodox could
desire."

Here, too, we have an example of the efficiency of the older biblical
theology in fettering the stronger minds and in stupefying the weaker.
Just as the book of Genesis had to wait over two thousand years for a
physician to reveal the simplest fact regarding its structure, so the
Song of Songs had to wait even longer for a poet to reveal not only its
beauty but its character. Commentators innumerable had interpreted it;
St. Bernard had preached over eighty sermons on its first two chapters;
Palestrina had set its most erotic parts to sacred music; Jews and
Gentiles, Catholics and Protestants, from Origen to Aben Ezra and from
Luther to Bossuet, had uncovered its deep meanings and had demonstrated
it to be anything and everything save that which it really is. Among
scores of these strange imaginations it was declared to represent the
love of Jehovah for Israel; the love of Christ for the Church; the
praises of the Blessed Virgin; the union of the soul with the body;
sacred history from the Exodus to the Messiah; Church history from the
Crucifixion to the Reformation; and some of the more acute Protesta