ume, and into it at the end of the eighteenth century came important contributions from two sources widely separated and most dissimilar.
The first of these, which gave a stimulus not yet exhausted, was the work of Herder. By a remarkable intuition he had anticipated some of those ideas of an evolutionary process in Nature and in literature which first gained full recognition 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; or if, like Castellio, under the sway of Calvin at Geneva, he dared speak openly, he must submit to obloquy and persecution. 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 had interpreted it at great length; St. Bernard had preached over eighty sermons on its first two chapters; Palestrina had set the most erotic parts of it 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 Protestant divines found in it references even to the religious wars in Germany and to the Peace of Passau. In these days it seems hard to imagine how really competent reasoners could thus argue without betraying doubts, after the manner of Cicero's augurs. Herder showed "Solomon's Song" to be what the whole thinking world now knows it to be—simply an Oriental love-poem.
But his frankness brought him into trouble; he was bitterly assailed. Neither his noble character nor his genius availed him. Obliged to flee from one pastorate to another, he at last found a
