442 LECTURES AND ESSAYS [1874- 



From this kind of composition the transition is easy to 

 properly didactic poetry. All deep personal feeling, such 

 as a noble and earnest lyric expresses, stands in close 

 relation to some universal truth. What the poet experi 

 ences in his own heart must have a validity going beyond 

 himself ; and in particular the religious conviction that 

 animates the Hebrew hymns has as its necessary source 

 and counterpart a body of general religious truth. 

 The worthless modern subjectivity which separates the 

 religious sentiment from all persuasion of objective 

 realities is remote from the spirit of the Old Testament ; 

 but, conversely, the general truths of the religion of Israel 

 (except in so far as they are embodied in ritual, precept, 

 or historic narrative) are always spoken to the heart as 

 well as to the intellect. The Israelite never thought of 

 framing a system of theology. His interest in religious 

 truth was not scientific but personal. The deepest truths 

 of the dispensation were not reasoned out scientifically, 

 but felt as personal necessities. The doctrine of immor 

 tality, for example, to which Socrates attained by argument 

 on the constitution of man s nature, is grasped by the 

 Israelite in personal assurance that death itself cannot part 

 him from God his Redeemer. Truths reached by such a 

 process by the reasoning of the heart, not of the head 

 necessarily assume a poetic form, which insensibly 

 merges into pure lyric. If the hymns of the Old Testa 

 ment express a personal emotion embodying and resting 

 on a general truth, the corresponding didactic poetry ex 

 presses general truth in the tone of personal enthusiastic 

 conviction. 



Of the truths so reached and set forth two things will 

 be plain. 



i. They must be sententious or aphoristic, rather than 

 parts of a system. This follows with psychological 

 necessity from the self -con tainedness of personal emotion. 

 A truth grasped by feeling stands out as a unity free from 

 all merely rational connection. The mind of him who has 



