the country gave no sign of a desire for even material improvement. After a century and a half of British occupancy through the East India Company Burke uttered this impeachment of the government: "England has erected no churches, no hospitals, no palaces, no schools; England has built no bridges, made no high roads, cut no navigations, dug out no reservoirs. Every other conqueror of every other description has left some monument either of state or beneficence behind him. Were we to be driven out of India this day nothing would remain to tell that it had been possessed during the inglorious period of our dominion by anything better than the orang-outang or the tiger." Of course the disposition of England toward the moral and religious condition of India was in harmony with the facts declared in this impeachment. The English Church, by the pen of Sydney Smith, ridiculed the idea of missions, and the government arrested the early missionaries. The first battle in behalf of India was fought and won in the House of Commons, under the leadership of Wilberforce, in 1812-13, in connection with the renewal of the charter of the East India Company. Wilberforce was the hero of religious toleration no less than of emancipation. He awakened the conscience of England to the moral needs of India. He defined the responsibilities of the government in its attempt to restrict religious instruction. He set free the spirit of religious enthusiasm, and gave it an impulse toward missions. He made it possible for England to impart her own moral and religious life to India, to become the benefactor and instructor of its peoples. And the record of England in her treatment of India under this change of sentiment and method gives one of the brightest pages in the history of the century. The England of the nineteenth century has nobly redeemed the faults and the crimes of the England of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. There is nothing grander or more significant in religious history than the conversion of England to her Christian duty toward India. It is the pledge and the prophecy of the conversion of India to Christianity.

CRITICAL APPENDIX TO VOLUME III.

PROFESSOR EZRA ABBOT'S NOTES TO SCRIVENER'S "PLAIN INTRODUCTION TO THE CRITICISM OF THE NEW TESTAMENT."

UPON the appearance of the third revised and enlarged edition of Dr. Scrivener's "Introduction," the late Dr. Ezra Abbot was invited to review it in our pages. He kindly acceded to this request, and was engaged in the work when the progress of the illness which proved fatal compelled him to desist. His successor in office and personal friend, Dr. Thayer, has collected the memoranda which he left, the accumulation of many studious years, and has added to them numerous contributions furnished for this purpose by Mr. J. Rendel Harris, Professor Warfield, and Dr. C. R. Gregory. The whole, together with an Introductory Note by Professor Thayer, will be published as a Critical Appendix to the Third Volume of this "Review," and will be found to be an indispensable supple

ment to a work which is generally recognized as the leading text-book in New Testament Criticism. It will make a pamphlet of more than fifty pages, and will be sent, without charge, with their August number, to all our subscribers who may apply for it before July 1. Subscribers in England will please communicate with Messrs. Ward, Lock & Co., Salisbury Square, London; in America, with Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin & Co., Boston, Mass. The pamphlet will also be sold separately. Price fifty cents.

BIBLICAL AND HISTORICAL CRITICISM.

THE SONG OF SOLOMON.

IN what I have to offer concerning Solomon's Song I shall not enter into the question of its canonicity except to say that in the rabbinical discussions which followed the destruction of Jerusalem, and which seem to have resulted in fixing the Old Testament Canon, while some doubted, the majority decided that this book was properly a part of the Jewish Scriptures. In effect this is the earliest information we have as to the estimation in which the book was held among the ancient Jews. Josephus, indeed, affirms that the Jews have twenty-two books (the minor prophets are counted as one) which are justly believed to be divine; but he leaves it uncertain whether he includes this among them. The fact that the Septuagint translation includes this Song might seem at first a weighty testimony in its favor. But the Alexandrian Jews appear to have been without the reverence for the Canon which prevailed in Palestine, as may be judged from the fact that they accepted the Apocryphal books in general with little discrimination; so that whilst their opinion has finally prevailed in the Roman Catholic Church (as decreed in the Council of Trent) it has little weight with critical scholars. As to the opinion of the early Christian Church little more can be said than that they accepted the judgment of the Palestinian rabbis as decisive, and received this book, as they did the rest of the Canon, without question, at their hands. Until recent times Solomon's Song has been almost universally regarded, both by Jews and Christians, as an allegory representing-under guise of the affection between husband and wife, or a lover and his betrothed some higher spiritual relation. I shall have occasion later to refer to the great variety of interpretations which have been advanced under this general view. Most of these interpretations, following the lead of Origen, find the poem expressive of the affection between God and his people; and the headings of the chapters in our common version will give a fair idea of their spirit and scope. This allegorical view of the Song of Songs was supposed to be necessary in order to establish its religious character, and its right to be a part of Holy Scripture. Still it could hardly escape the notice of an exact reader that the book had a certain realistic aspect; or, in other words, that there were things about it indicating the intention of the author to convey a real narrative. Hence arose a modification of the allegorical view, commonly called the mystical, which recognized a literal basis of the higher spiritual teaching. The celebrated Dutch publicist, Hugo Grotius, was the first to bring this view into prominence.

Bossuet, the great French preacher, in his "Commentary on Canticles," followed in the same line; and his view was accepted in the main, as "at least affording some light on an obscure subject," by Lowth, author of the “Lectures on Hebrew Poetry." Lowth's account of the theory of Bossuet, slightly abbreviated, is as follows: The poem is divided into seven parts, corresponding to the seven days of the marriage feast among the Jews. The bridegroom, who is represented in the character of a shepherd, goes forth every morning to the accustomed occupations of a rural and pastoral life. He returns at night. The bride laments his absence; she seeks him and brings him home; she loses and seeks him again, though with different success. She complains, languishes, indites messages, indulges her passion in describing his person, etc. A dramatic form is evident, though, as Lowth thinks, of an inferior species. Bossuet made more of this.

The way was prepared by the labors of these men for the introduction of the purely literal view, which has since increasingly prevailed. This had had some advocates from early times. Thus Theodore of Mopsuestia, a celebrated scholar of Syria, about A. D. 400, maintained that the Song of Solomon was of an immoral character, and should be excluded from the Canon. For this with other heresies he was condemned and anathematized at the second Council of Constantinople a hundred years later. In 1554 Sebastian Castellio, for the like cause, was accused before the Senate of Geneva, and banished from the city.

The eminent German critic J. D. Michaelis, commenting on Lowth's great work, maintained that the Song is the portrayal of a pure conjugal love. His notes were incorporated by Lowth in the second edition of his lectures. A certain coarseness characterized the view of Michaelis. The opposite was true of Herder, in his treatise entitled, "Songs of Love the Oldest and Sweetest in the East." Herder regarded the book as made up of pure and beautiful, but disconnected, poems. His view found favor with Eichhorn among scholars, and at first with the poet Goethe, though he is said afterwards to have accepted that of Jacobi. Herder still commands a large following.

In 1771 J. T. Jacobi propounded his interpretation, which has grown in favor to the present time. According to Jacobi, the poem represents King Solomon as trying to win away a beautiful maiden, whom he has chanced to meet in the country, from the shepherd lover to whom she had been previously betrothed; but her true affection is proof even against the seductions of royalty, and the result is the glorious triumph of her constancy. This view, presented rudely and imperfectly by Jacobi, struggled to hold its ground, gaining a few supporters, -Ständler in 1792, Ammon in 1794, notably Umbreit in 1820, till it was finally adopted by Ewald in 1826, whose critical acumen, united with the authority of his great name, secured for it a wider currency. Hitzig (1855), Ginsburg (1857), Renan (1860), became advocates of this view. Robertson Smith in an admirable article in the "Encyclopædia Britannica" is its latest exponent.

I need only mention in addition the theory of Delitzsch, who finds a dramatic form in the poem (though without supposing that it was ever acted), and thinks it was written by Solomon, and portrays his love to a peasant maiden whom he made his wife, and learned from her the sweetness of pure conjugal affection as contrasted with the evils necessarily attending polygamy.

I shall be compelled, in order to do any justice to my subject, briefly to criticise the interpretations that have been mentioned, and to show why the greater part of them must be dismissed as untenable.

And first, as to the allegorical interpretations in general. It is a serious argument against this whole class of views that the Song itself affords no clue to any spiritual meaning which it is intended to teach. It differs in this respect from all other Scripture allegories. There are many instances of the use of this figure in the Old Testament, but there is no other in which the allegorical intention is not made entirely clear. This is especially true of those passages in Ezekiel, Hosea, and elsewhere, which liken the relation of God with his people to that between husband and wife. In the utter absence of this feature in the Song of Songs the interpreter is shut up to one of two courses. He can regard it as expressive in a general sense merely of the love between God and the Church; but in that case the book creates the impression of wearisome sameness, being made up of intense, but largely similar, asseverations and reiterations of love. If, on the other hand, the poem is conceived as exhibiting the divine love and that of the Church in some continuous history or progressive series of events, which is the truer use of allegory, then the absence of any clue to guide the thought leaves the mind free to an unlimited range of interpretation.

The book has thus been supposed to describe the history of Israel from the exodus to the third temple (the "Chaldee Paraphrase"); the contemporaneous history of Israel under Solomon (Luther); the longing of the remnant of the ten tribes, after the dispersal of their main body, to come under the sway of the good king Hezekiah (Zug); the relation of the Israelitish king to the heathen world about him, and his desire, and that of his people, for their conversion (Hahn); the relation between the active and reflective intellect (Mediæval Rabbis); Solomon's loving intercourse with Wisdom. As applied to Christian times, it has been supposed to portray the history of the legal and evangelical Churches, with especial reference to Peter Waldo and other medieval worthies (Brightman); the disclosure of the secret of the philosopher's stone ("Cantica Canticorum chymice explicata," a work now lost); the love between the Divine Being and the Virgin Mary (Ghislerius); the story of Christ's life, as contained especially in the Gospels and Acts (A. Stuart Moody); communion with Christ and angels in the grave (Puffendorf).1

This partial résumé of interpretations shows the vagueness of the alle gory, if it is one, and its small value save to the commentators, who have found it, for their purposes, the most fruitful piece of writing of equal length in the Old Testament.

I will add but one other argument against the allegorical view. This book is very human in its character. It describes human love, human passion, and however pure and true, rightly considered, these expressions may be, our minds revolt from accepting them as ascribed to the Divine Being. It does not comport with modern ideas of what is becoming to think of God as addressing either the church at large or the individual saint in such terms as these: "I have compared thee to my steed" (literally my mare) "in Pharaoh's stud;" or, again: "Thy teeth are like a flock of sheep.

1 I have intended to give the name of the leading propounder of each view. There were, of course, in many cases various advocates of the same view. The curious reader will find a very complete exhibit of the various interpretations in Lange's Commentary. Their number is legion.

thy two breasts are like two young roes, thy navel is like a round goblet that wanteth not liquor, thy belly is like an heap of wheat set around by lilies." It is this difficulty that under the allegorical view has, in recent times, thrown the book almost entirely out of popular use; so that it can be safely said that not one out of a hundred, even among intelligent Christians, is in the habit of reading Solomon's Song with the expectation of deriving spiritual profit from it.

These arguments against the allegorical interpretation apply with almost equal force against the so-called mystical views, those of Grotius, Bossuet, and others, that acknowledge a literal basis to the poem, while still they regard the spiritual (mystical) meaning as the writer's highest object. Isaac Taylor indeed, in his "Spirit of Hebrew Poetry," thinks that an argument in favor of the religious intention of this poem "might be made to rest on the very absence, throughout it, of those religious expressions the want of which has seemed to contravene the general belief of the Church concerning it." He thinks it may convey more perfectly its mystical meaning than if the divine and human were mingled in it; and that while we Occidentals, reading it by itself, would never suspect a religious intention, we may-since we find it among the Scripture writingsbelieve that it has such a meaning, and that its wonderfully pure and beautiful expressions of conjugal affection mirror the great mystery. I am unable fully to understand his argument, or to see its force.

Touching the purely literal views, (1) We may dismiss that which regards the heroine as the Egyptian princess, the bride of Solomon. There is no word in the poem to favor this view. On the contrary, the heroine is a country maiden, and distinctly named the Shulamite, doubtless from Shunem (or Sulem) on the plain of Esdraelon.

(2) We must dismiss, also, I think, Herder's view that the book contains a number of independent poems. (De Wette, Gesenius, Bleek, who, however, supposes a redactor, Professor Noyes of Harvard, Professor Green of Princeton, American editor of Lange, and others.) There are various exquisite passages in this writing, but it is not capable of being divided into songs which stand as complete in themselves. Moreover, the same characters run through the work, Shulamith, Solomon, the women of Jerusalem, the shepherd lover. Similar expressions also continually occur; as the question, Who is this? beginning a new passage; the charge to the women ending important passages. It is significant also that, while in various parts of the poem mention is made of the mother of the Shulamite, the father is never spoken of. Evidently the mother has married again, and the brothers are half-brothers; hence their want of perfect kindness to her. In short, a unity is indicated in the poem which the mind feels compelled to establish if it can. Only when the effort to do this has failed can we accept the theory of independent

poems.

(3) What shall we say, then, to the theory of Delitzsch, who, it will be remembered, holds that the poem describes the affection of Solomon for a peasant whom he makes his wife, and learns from her the sweetness of true wedded love? It would be pleasant to be able to accept this view, and some high authorities are earnest in maintaining it. I may mention Zöckler (whose historical sketch of commentators and their views is very elaborate) in Lange's "Commentary," also the "Bible Commentary" (T. L. Kingsbury), and Charles Kingsley in his " Hypatia." Delitzsch concedes that the palace is distasteful to the Shulamite, and that her heart is