298 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



ume, and into it at the end of the eighteenth century came impor- 

 tant 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 an- 

 ticipated 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 bril- 

 liant, 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 un- 

 covered 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 Prot- 

 estant 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 with- 

 out betraying doubts, after the manner of Cicero's augurs. Her- 

 der 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 



