all that is true, however sad, and profitable, and agreeable to the will of God in a practical handbook adapted to those troublesome times. Ewald and Vaihinger both divide the book into four sections,—(1) i. 2-ii. 26, (2) iii. 1-vi. 9, (3) vi. 10-viii. 15, (4) viii. 16-xii. 8, with the Epilogue xii. 9-14. The latter, whose view is more developed than Ewald's, and whom I refer to as closing and summing up a period, maintains that each section consists of three parts which are again subdivided—for Koheleth, though you would not think it, is a literary artist—into strophes and half-strophes, and that the theme of each section is thrown out, seemingly by chance, but really with consummate art, in the preceding one. Thus the four sections interlace, and the unity of the book is established. The Epilogue, too, according to Vaihinger, can thus be proved to be the work of the author of Koheleth; for it does but ratify and develope what has already been indicated in xi. 9, and without it the connection of ideas would be incomplete.[1] I think that our experience of some interpreters of the Book of Job may predispose us to be sceptical of such ingenious subtleties, and I notice that more recent critics show a tendency to insist less on the logical distribution of the contents and to regard the book, not indeed as a mere collection of rules of conduct, but at any rate as a record of a practical and not a scholastic philosopher. This tendency is not indeed of recent origin, though it has increased in favour of late years. Prior the poet had already said that Ecclesiastes 'is not a regular and perfect treatise, but that in it great treasures are "heaped up together in a confused magnificence;"'[2] Bishop Lowth, that 'the connection of the arguments is involved in much obscurity;'[3] while Herder, in his letters to a theological student, had penned this wise though too enthusiastic sentence, which cuts at the root of all attempts at logical analysis,
Kein Buch ist mir aus dem Alterthum bekannt, welches die
Summe des menschlichen Lebens, seine Abwechselungen und
