OLD TESTAMENT SCIENCE 547 



of physical energy, so plainly are their action and interaction dis- 

 played, for example, in the pleadings of Hosea, the invocations of the 

 ninetieth Psalm, or the patriotic visions and declamations of the 

 Second Isaiah. From a general point of view a distant parallel may 

 be found in the national songs of modern Japan. There is no literary 

 product of recent time like these for intensified energy or power of 

 popular inspiration; for the Japanese alone, among great modern 

 peoples, have combined in one overpowering patriotic sentiment 

 the conceptions and passions of the old world and the new. 



(c) This inherent force and freshness of the Hebrew national poetry 

 were still further augmented when the prophets expressed the 

 sentiments and passions of a community within the community, of 

 an Israel within Israel, of a party of long-tried and faithful souls, 

 contending for the principles which were at once the salvation of 

 the state and a revelation of the nature and will of the God of Israel 

 and of the universe. 



(5) We may notice finally the bearings of Hebrew literature 

 upon the question of the causes of the production and decline of 

 poetry and imaginative composition generally. It seems to be an 

 invariable law that poetic fervor and creativeness belong to the 

 earlier national life of every literary people and not to the period of 

 its maturity. It is not that in their later time the cultured peoples 

 of the world lose the inspiration of religious faith or of national 

 freedom or of international conflict; for no one of these conditions' 

 explains the decline of imaginative genius among the Anglo-Keltic 

 or the Romanic or the Germanic nations. There comes a time in the 

 history of every highly endowed people, even the most romantic and 

 enthusiastic, when literature ceases to be spontaneous and creative, 

 and becomes reflective, critical, and, so to speak, professional, while 

 at the same time accelerated progress is shown in other intellectual 

 fields, in all liberal arts, in industry, commerce, and political and 

 social life. But poetry or idealistic literature flourished all through 

 the history of Israel. Instead of declining with the loss of national 

 independence and political freedom, it became finer and nobler. 

 The best poetry did not precede the best prose, as in the history of 

 other great literatures, but followed it. For a thousand years a 

 genius for poetry and song wrought in Israel irrepressibly, as though 

 endowed with the freshness and vigor of perpetual youth. This 

 also is unique. Professor Macdonald pointed out to us yesterday 

 that the old songs of the pre-Islamic Arabs are still chanted in the 

 interior of the great peninsula, essentially unchanged in form and 

 spirit, But these Arabs of the desert had not to submit to the 

 unnerving and vulgarizing process of constant national attrition 

 and degradation. They were like the people of whom an anony- 

 mous prophet has said that like wine settled in the lees it had not 



