ll of strange words. The
hero of the poem is of strange land and parentage, a
Gentile certainly, not a Jew. The life, the manners,
the customs, are of all varieties and places--Egypt,
with its river and its pyramids, is there; the description
of mining points to Phoenicia; the settled life in cities,
the nomad Arabs, the wandering caravans, the heat of
the tropics, and the ice of the north, all are foreign to
Canaan, speaking of foreign things and foreign people.
No mention, or hint of mention, is there throughout
the poem, of Jewish traditions or Jewish certainties.
We look to find the three friends vindicate themselves,
as they so well might have done, by appeals to the
fertile annals of Israel, to the Flood, to the cities of the
plain, to the plagues of Egypt, or the thunders of Sinai.
But of all this there is not a word; they are passed by
as if they had no existence; and instead of them, when
witnesses are required for the power of God, we have
strange un-Hebrew stories of the eastern astronomic
mythology, the old wars of the giants, the imprisoned
Orion, the wounded dragon, "the sweet influences of
the seven stars," and the glittering fragments of the
sea-snake Rahab trailing across the northern sky.
Again, God is not the God of Israel, but the father of
mankind; we hear nothing of a chosen people, nothing
of a special revelation, nothing of peculiar privileges;
and in the court of heaven there is a Satan, not the
prince of this world and the enemy of God, but the
angel of judgment, the accusing spirit whose mission
was to walk to and fro over the earth, and carry up to
heaven an account of the sins of mankind. We cannot
believe that thoughts of this kind arose out of Jerusalem
in the days of Josiah. In this book, if anywhere, we
have the record of some aner polutropos who, like the
old hero of Ithaca,

pollon anthropon iden astea kai voon egno
polla d' hog'en tonto tathen algea hon kata thumon,
arnumenos psuchen

but the scenes, the names, and the incidents, are all
contrived as if to baffle curiosity, as if, in the very form
of the poem, to teach us that it is no story of a single
thing which happened once, but that it belongs to
humanity itself, and is the drama of the trial of man,
with Almighty God and the angels as the spectators
of it.

No reader can have failed to have been struck with
the simplicity of the opening. Still, calm, and most
majestic, it tells us everything which is necessary to b