Psalms, one hundred and two-as I make out-date from the Persian period, which extends from the return from Babylon to the conquests of Alexander. Of these only ten are certainly older than the days of Nehemiah, viz., Psalms v., vi., xxii., xxxii., xxxv., li., lxx., lxxi., xciii., and cii., to which we should very probably add Psalms xcv.-c., and possibly Psalms cxx.-cxxiii. These named, then, are, according to Professor Cheyne, the oldest hymns in the collection. To the period of Jewish history from the downfall of the Persian power to the Maccabæan revolt, the pre-Maccabæan Greek period, are assigned in all twenty psalms; while twenty-seven-not by any means so extravagant a number as the totals of some previous critics-are allotted to the stirring times of the Maccabees, down to the final editing of our present Psalter by Simon Maccabæus. These Maccabæan Psalms are Psalms xx., xxi., xxxiii., xliv., lx., lxi., lxiii., lxxix, lxxxiii., ci., cviii. (add cx. omitted in the author's summary p. 456), cxv.-cxviii., cxxxv.-cxxxviii., cxlv.-cxlvii. (?) cxlviii.-cl., distributed, it will be noted, through all the books. From this brief summary of our author's results as obtained by the critical analysis of the Psalter, we see that not only has David been displaced from his poetic throne, but there is no certain place found for a single psalm till the close of the Babylonian Exile. This will be sufficiently startling to those who have not followed the recent tendency in the Higher Criticism of the Old Testament to rob more and more the pre-Exilic period of the literary treasures wherewith tradition has enriched it. Some readers may even feel

a measure of surprise that results so little in accordance with the hitherto accepted views of Hebrew history and of the chosen instruments of Divine revelation, should have appeared with the imprimatur of the Bampton Trustees; but Canon Cheyne assures us in advance that the object of his book while "primarily historical," is "also in a real sense apologetic." The apologist of Christianity, he adds elsewhere, has nothing to lose, but everything to gain, if the Psalter, as a whole, can be shown to be of postExilic growth. In what sense this is true will be found in the lectures: attention may be particularly called to note k, p. 276, and to the closing paragraphs of the last lecture.

In the second group of lectures (vi.-viii.) Canon Cheyne does not attempt to construct a formal theology of the Psalter, but wisely restricts himself to certain aspects of the teaching of the book which have not as yet received due attention from Jewish and Christian scholars. Such are the ideas of God in the Psalter in the second part of Lecture vi.-the notes to which contain an important discussion of the meaning of the Divine name, Adonai, and the growing preference of the Jews for it-the Messianic element in the Psalter in a part of Lecture vii., and, in particular, in Lecture viii., the attitude of the Hebrew psalmists to the belief in immortality and a resurrection to judgment. The treatment of this most important theme has been considerably expanded since the delivery of the lectures, and is full of suggestiveness to the Christian student. The Professor's theory, as is now pretty generally known, is that these ideas are native Hebrew ideas, which, however, owe

their development and popularization to the fostering influence of Zoroastrianism, the religion of their over-lords and neighbours the Persians.

Along with this valuable discussion in text and notes, or rather before it, should be read the somewhat more popular presentation of this thesis in the Professor's Oxford lectures on "Possible Zoroastrian Influences on the Religion of Israel," in the Expository Times, vol. ii (1891). Many of us ought to be stimulated thereby to acquire a closer acquaintance with the teaching of Zarathustra, whom Cheyne, in one of those too ingenious conjectures which are scattered throughout his book, thinks we may have known from our childhood disguised as the Hebrew Daniel!

The lectures are followed by a couple of appendices, the one entitled "Last Words on the Maccabæan Psalms, and Other Points" (pp. 445-460), much too meagre for a worthy treatment of the important questions raised; the other, "The Linguistic Affinities of the Psalms" (pp. 461-484), a storehouse of material for future students of the Psalter. Excellent indices of names and subjects, and of the Scriptural passages discussed or referred to, add greatly to the usefulness of the work to the Old Testament student.

Coming now to pronounce on the merit of these Bampton Lectures as a whole, I have no hesitation in pronouncing them the most stimulating and thought-compelling study of the Hebrew Psalter that has ever been given to the public. It is true that they compel, in the more critical and analytic part more particularly, almost as often to dissent as to consent, but even this will be gain in the end. They must, of course, be unwelcome to those by whom all tampering with traditional theology is tabooed; but even to many of us who recognize, in the growing acceptance of the assured results of historical criticism, the continued presence in the Church of the guiding Spirit of Truth, Canon Cheyne's critical results are somewhat extreme. I for one am not yet prepared to acquiesce in thus robbing the long preExilic period of all its traditional heritage of song, but this does not affect the legitimate pride one feels in the fact that we possess a native scholar capable of producing work that will take its place beside the best which the German and Dutch schools can show. Whatever may be the judgment of the next generation of Old Testament students on the results and methods of the Bampton Lectures for 1889-and no one knows better than their brilliant author that neither are his results final nor his methods beyond criticism— this, at least, is certain, that psalm-criticism, for many years to come, will have to start from an examination of the results here recorded. Many of these have an aspect of finality; others, I am confident, will have to be modified in the light of further research; but all will have to be reckoned with by subsequent students of the "hymn-book of the second temple."

This somewhat lengthy notice may now be closed by an indication of one or two points where the writer is unable to follow Canon Cheyne in his conclusions. In the forefront of my objections I would put one for which the latter is prepared. "Modern minds,” he says in his more recent Oxford lectures referred to above, " find it difficult to take in the nationalistic

interpretation of the Psalms," a theory on which much stress is laid in these lectures. It is to the effect that the authors of the Hebrew Psalms, almost without exception, speak and write "not as individuals, but in the name of the Church-nation. In the psalmists as such the individual consciousness was all but lost in the corporate. They had their private joys and sorrows, but they did not make these the theme of song" (p. 265). The consistent application of this theory leads, as a matter of course, to the whole Psalter being relegated to post-Exilic times, when the "remnant" of the Hebrew nation had become the Jewish Church. The Church of pre-Exilic days, we are told again and again, was "too germinal" to appropriate the advanced religious ideas of this or that psalm, and therefore the latter must be post-Exilic. Surely it is far more probable that choice spirits of the days of the Monarchy may have seen visions of Divine things to which the mass, even of the godly in Israel, were blind, just as the mountain-peaks catch the first rays of the rising sun, while the valleys below are still in darkness. These lyric outpourings of praise, or penitence, or prayer would naturally be drawn upon at a later time by the Temple authorities; and in those days, when literary proprietorship was unknown, it would be easy by additions or omissions or otherwise to adapt them for liturgic use. An unmistakable example of such editorial adaptation, which also seems to me to betray the date at which it was made, may be found in the two last verses of the fifty-first Psalm, in the whole of which, according to the ablest champion of the nationalistic theory-Professor Smend-"there is nothing. individualistic." Now, there is clearly a contradiction in thought between the verses referred to and the verses that immediately precede them, as Cheyne admits in opposition to both Robertson Smith and Smend, who maintain the unity of thought throughout. The whole difficulty disappears when we read the body of the psalm as an individual confession of sin, written in the spirit of the great prophets, but yet while sacrifice might be offered, for this verse 16 (Heb. 18) implies. The appended verses are then easily intelligible, as the addition of a post-Exilic but pre-Nehemianic editor, who sought by this means to render the Psalm a fitting expression of national repentance and national aspirations.1

In the second place, I find my self unable, on the basis of Canon Cheyne's results, to form an intelligible theory of the history of the earlier hymn-books of which our Psalter is admittedly composed. I can find no answer to such questions as these: What were the sacred songs which must have been sung by those members of the guild of "singers "which came with Zerubbabel" (Ezra ii. 2, 41)? Why should so many of the precious psalms of the Return (see p. 121 above) have had to wait for a Maccabæan editor to admit them to the Temple hymn-book; and how, on the other hand, are we to account for the insertion of so many Maccabæan psalms in the early Psalters?

1It is, of course, not denied that the nationalistic theory applies to many of the Psalms, especially in the later books; my objection is only to its all but universal application and the results that necessarily follow.

My third difficulty in the way of admitting that nearly a third of the Psalter is later than Alexander arises from the phenomena presented by the Septuagint version. It is true that we do not know at what date the completed Psalter was translated into Greek, but if the Pentateuch of the LXX. dates from the middle of the third century, a Greek Psalter of some sort for is it not a commonplace that "the Psalter contains the answer of the worshipping community to the demands made upon it in the law "?—could not have been long delayed. Still, the ignorance displayed by the Greek translators of the meaning of so many of the titles to the psalms, which are admittedly much older than the Maccabæan period, seems to argue for a greater antiquity than Canon Cheyne allows. And with regard to two psalms in particular, the LXX., in my opinion, imperatively forbids the acceptance of his views. For I cannot help thinking that one of the least successful of Cheyne's attributions is that of Ps. xlv. and lxxii. to the reign of Ptolemy Philadelphus, the former being a panegyric from the pen of a Jewish admirer (whose name is given) on the occasion of this prince's marriage with Arsinoe, the daughter of Lysimachus! It is admitted that such poems could not have gained admission into the canonical Psalter till the history of their origin had been forgotten and they had acquired another and higher interpretation. But even if such an eventuality were possible at Jerusalem, it must surely have been impossible in the capital of the Ptolemies. This is apart altogether from the difficulties of interpretation, and the other difficulties which this attribution involves.

I must dissent finally from Canon Cheyne's attitude towards the Elyon Psalms," those, that is, in which the Divine name Elyon is found (see index, and especially pp. 83 and 464). That this title in itself is sufficient to establish the post-Exilic date of the nineteen psalms in which it occurs (see p. 464) is untenable, and rests ultimately, it seems to me, on a mistaken opinion as to the date of that most mysterious chapter, Gen. xiv. But the discussion of this point must be taken up elsewhere.

These remarks are made in the spirit of a pupil who would explain his difficulties to a master, in whose teaching there" are some things hard to be understood."

EXPOSITORY THOUGHT.

THE GREATNESS OF JOHN THE BAPTIST.

BY REV. PRINCIPAL DAVID BROWN, D.D.

He shall be great in the sight of the Lord.-LUKE i. 15 (also Matt. xi. 2, and Luke vii. 18). "Now when John heard in the prison the works of Christ" (Matt. xi. 2), Luke says it was "the disciples of John" that "told him of all these things" (vii. 18). But how came John to be there? He had been too faithful to Herod Antipas, to whose Court John appears to have been

invited this tetrarch of Galilee, in whose character there were some good points. His foster-brother, Manaen, was not only a Christian, but one of the prophets and teachers that were in the Church of Antioch (Acts xiii. 1), and the wife of Herod's steward (Susanna) was a disciple of Christ, and had the privilege of accompanying Him on one of His preaching tours, and, with other women who, grateful for what He had done for them, "ministered to Him and the Twelve of their substance" (Luke viii. 1). And Herod himself had good points in his character. He "heard John gladly, and did many things" (Mark vi. 20). "He feared John (says the evangelist), because he was a righteous and holy man." But John (says Bengel) did not fear Herod; for, living as he was an incestuous. life with his brother (Herod) Philip's wife, he dared to tell him, "It is not lawful for thee to have her." Herod, stung though he could not fail to be by so bold a thrust, could have stood it-for he had a conscience. But the vile woman with whom he lived had none. So long as such a man lived she could not rest. She would have his head for it. But Herod "kept him safe" (R.V.—not "observed him," A.V.). At length, however, yielding, we may suppose, to her importunities, he allowed him to be put out of her way by "shutting him up in prison "—the keep, probably, of the castle where he was living, the castle of Machaerus, at the south-eastern extremity of his dominions. Therefore he lay, it would seem, for more than a yearunmolested, no doubt, but all solitary and unrelieved. Meanwhile, his Master was not only doing mighty works wherever He went, but empowering His Apostles to do all kinds of healing miracles. "And the disciples of John told him of all these things" (Luke vii. 17).

But how came there to be any of John's disciples who did not detach themselves from him and henceforth join his Master? Was he not even twitted for allowing himself to be thus deserted (John iii. 26)? Yes. And did he not reply that for that express purpose he was sent? Yes. Yet here are "the disciples of John," and they were not a mere two or three. As a piece of information it is interesting and suggestive. Were they right or were they wrong in preferring the servant to the Master? Perhaps you would have liked to ask the Master Himself. And I think I hear Him replying, "What is that to thee? Follow thou Me." Perhaps there was that in His teaching the impression of which upon them was such that they profited most by it. But be this as it may, one thing is certain, it provided company for the faithful servant in his lonely cell. Nor did he need to say, with Paul to Timothy, " Be not ashamed of me, His prisoner." Rather, they would account it their privilege in this way to cheer his solitude. And Herod himself would be pleased to learn it. For though he could not disentangle himself from that object of his passion, he would do everything else to soften the effect of the wrong he had done to that holy man. Nor can we doubt the Divine hand there was in it all.

Well, they tell the prisoner what works Jesus and the Twelve were doing. And with what effect? On their part, I venture to think, insinuations, more