not merely a collection of various messages from prophets and apostles to the church of the olden time the Jewish or the church of the more modern time-the Christian. It is true, these prophets were messengers to the people of Israel, but they were more than that. They were interpreters of Israel to itself. It was their function to do what is the work of the prophet in all ages, to pierce beneath the mere temporary experience, the mere mask of humanity, and discern the innermost light of the soul, which is itself the life of God, and bring it to consciousness. There was a message of Moses, and of David, and of Isaiah, and of Paul; but in all these messages, uniting them all and making them one great message, there was a message of Israel to the world, and this message of Israel to the world the Bible interprets to us.

In reading the history and literature of the Hebrew race as they are contained in the Bible the omissions appear to the thoughtful student as striking as the contributions. There is nothing indicating that the Hebrew people contributed anything whatever to art. Sculpture and painting were apparently forbidden to them, lest the paintings and the statues should become the objects of idolatrous veneration. They contributed nothing to architecture, save in the structure of a temple devoted to their religion, and that appears, from the accounts of it which have come down to us, to have been imitated from the Temple of the Egyptians. They contributed nothing to the world's music. In liter

ature they did nothing for literature's sake, — all their literature is a vehicle for the conveyance of ethical or spiritual life. All the great controversies in the nation were religious controversies; they fought no battles for civil liberty, they had no Kossuth, their controversies all turned upon questions respecting the nature of God and the obligations of man toward God. They were not preeminently a spiritual people; but their life had to do almost exclusively with ethical and spiritual problems. This people, thus dealing with religion, existed as a nation for about twelve centuries, beginning with the time of Moses and ending with the time of Christ, when the organic existence of the nation came to an end, and the people were dispersed. During this time their life found its expression in their literature, as the life of all peoples finds its expression in literature. It is their life thus expressed which I have endeavored to interpret in this volume. Literature, however, does not represent primarily the common thoughts of the common people; it is the expression of the highest and best thoughts of the leaders of the people. Goethe is essentially German, but not all Germans could have written "Faust." Shakespeare is essentially English, but not all Englishmen could have written "Hamlet." The character of the people appears in their great leaders; the life of the people is represented by their great minds. Whatever may be said of the ancient Hebrews as a race, the leaders of the Hebrew people were essentially

religious. What interested them were the religious questions; and their literature, so far as it has been preserved to us, deals almost exclusively with the great religious problems the nature of God, the nature of man, the relationship between God and man, and the way in which man can be brought into right relationships with his God. This literature constitutes the Old Testament.

The Old Testament, then, according to that modern conception which underlies this volume, is the record of the message of Israel to the world; it is the literature of a people commissioned by God to search out, receive, and communicate to the world the answer to these four questions:

Who is God?

What is man?

What is the right relationship between God and ?

man

How can that right relationship be brought about?

This literature is, however, not primarily the expression of the common thought of the nation on these subjects; it is the expression of the thought of their great spiritual leaders. Often that thought is expressed in antagonism to the public sentiment; but the errors against which their leaders inveigh are not primarily political or social errors, but religious errors. Their errors and their right judgments, their beliefs and their disbeliefs, their virtues and their vices, all mark this nation as one pondering the problems of religion.

The Old Testament is the selected literature of an elect people. I say the selected literature, because there are some books written during these twelve or thirteen centuries and still extant, which are not in our Protestant Bible, and others referred to or quoted from in the Bible which have perished, and doubtless still others which have so absolutely perished that there is no reference to them whatever. What we have in the Old Testament is what in scientific terms would be called the survival of the fittest; it is those words of the great leaders of a great people on the problems of religion which had such a quality that they could survive the sifting of the centuries.

This literature is pervaded by a religious spirit. There are myths; they are the vehicle of religious truth. There are legends; they show how far back in the patriarchal age this people was pondering the problem of religion; how its very progenitor, Abraham, centuries before the nation was born, was puzzled by the question of God, and left his native land and turned his back upon all the unsatisfying idolatries that surrounded him, to see if he could find some better knowledge and some better fellowship with God than any which those idolatries furnished to him. It has folk-lore; the folk-lore shows us that the stories which the mothers told their children were pervaded by the same spirit of faith in God and of humanity to man. It has lyrics; with possibly two or three exceptions they are not love songs, nor patriotic

songs, but songs of praise to God, or of penitence because of sin against him, or of sorrow because of exile from him, or of gratitude upon return to him. It has a drama of love; this drama is for the purpose of illustrating that loyalty of love which is the foundation of the family. It has a great epic drama this drama deals with the relation of the soul to God in time of sorrow and of doubt. It has a romantic history; not that of a great nation, not that of the heroes of a great nation, but that of the way in which God dealt with his people and the way in which his people dealt with their God. It has eloquent though fragmentary orations; they are not political or literary; they all deal with the problems of the religious life, social or individual. There is law; its foundation is in the preamble to the Hebrew constitution: "God spake all these words, saying." From the opening verse in the collection, "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth," to the closing verse, "God shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children," these writings -law, history, legend, folk-lore, drama, lyrics, proverbs, oratory - have but one object, to give the answer of a divinely illuminated consciousness to the questions, Who is God? What is man? What is the right relationship between God and man? How can that right relationship be brought about?

According to one conception of the Old Testament, thirty or forty men, unique in character, aud separated from all their fellow men by their