the object, as of the agent to which it is directed. Human personality, in its existence and in its exercise alike, is taken account of in divine foreordination, as to their results and consequences. The actions and their results are known or foreknown, as free actions. If they are so in reality, they will be known by a perfect Being to be so. Knowing a fact, whether by divine or human knowledge, does not make it. It must be either an actuality or a possibility, before it can be known. To Him who knows all things from eternity, the act, of course, is as if it had taken place. But that does not make it take place. The divine freedom, it has been well said, is not at all interfered with, through the perfection of the divine knowledge. Just as little does that knowledge interfere with the freedom and accountability of finite human agents. God reveals himself as dealing with men according to their characters, as they belong to certain classes. As they manifest character, and range themselves in these classes, they make manifest the grounds of the divine ordination. The ultimate and unconditional ground in such case is with reference to the essential character, the proximate and conditional ground is the personal choice and conduct which makes the individual a partaker of such character. And the peculiarity of Scripture is that it deals with men in reference to this latter. While it represents God as sovereign in his modes of dealing, and in the principles of his divine administration, it makes each man accountable, as an individual, for the way in which, under these principles, or in any particular mode, he comes under treatment. Just as every such an one must render an account to God; so, in the rendition of that account, he "bears his own burden."

ARTICLE VI.

CHEYNE ON THE PSALTER.1

BY PRESIDENT S. C. BARTLETT, D. D., LL. D., HANOVER, N. H.

IN this volume we have the Bampton Lectures delivered at Oxford in 1889, modified, enlarged, supplied with copious notes, and published in an octavo volume of 517 pages. It is the work of one who has long been engaged in the study and exposition of the Old Testament Scriptures, and has published several previous volumes. It is brimful of quotations, and references, and multifarious learning. The writer is familiar with the older and the more recent expositors, and to some extent with rabbinic writers, and shows a good acquaintance with classical and English literature. His work abounds in Scripture references,—some fifteen hundred of them to other parts of the Old Testament, and a much greater number to expressions in the Psalms. He has freedom and versatility of style, although chargeable with dif He fuseness, indirectness, and not seldom indistinctness. has a system of his own, not at first apprehensible by the reader. It requires a good deal of reading fully to grasp his principles and method of argument, or to recognize the full results and bearings of his discussion, scattered as they are through the volume, and some of them rather assumed or implied than directly announced.

1 The Psalter: Its Origin and Religious Contents, in the Light of Old Testament Criticism and the History of Religions. With an Introduction and Appendices. Eight Lectures preached before the University of Oxford in the year 1889, on the foundation of the late Rev. John Bampton, M. A., Canon of Salisbury. By Thomas Kelly Cheyne, M. A., D. D., Oriel Professor of the Interpretation of Holy Scripture, and Canon of Rochester. don Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner and Co. 1891.

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This last-mentioned fact, together with the size of the volume, and the great number of points, principal and subordinate, involved in his treatise, creates a difficulty in criticising it in a brief essay. To answer it thoroughly would require a volume of equal size. The writer himself alludes to so many changes of opinion (pp. 128, 130, 164, etc.), as to awaken an expectation that in some particulars he may yet answer himself. Indeed, to deal with the manifold details of the book might simply result in diverting attention to its fundamental qualities, and method of procedure. As a clear statement of facts is often found the best argument, so in this case a clear disentangling of the principles and method of the volume may be the best criticism. We proceed at once to the statement, with little attempt at formal reply.

The aim of this large and learned volume is to show that none of the Psalms was written by David or his cotemporaries; that the eighteenth is "the only possible pre-Exile psalm" (p. 258), the "earliest possible date" of that being the last days of Josiah or perhaps the Exile (p. 206); and that the larger part of them belong to Maccabean times, coming down as late as not only the time of Judas, but (p. 24) that of Simon Maccabeus, 142 B. C.

In maintaining this position, it is noteworthy, and marks a slight turn of the tide in Old Testament criticism, that the author does not rely primarily nor strongly upon alleged linguistic peculiarities. This was long the stronghold of the advocates of the late origin of the Old Testament books, but the reader of Kuenen, and especially of Wellhausen, will perceive it dropping more and more into the Dr. Cheyne follows in the same line, and more frankly. For he says (p. 16), “I should not lay any great stress on the linguistic criteria" of the alleged Maccabean psalms. When he adduces such as he can offer in an Appendix, it is with the preliminary statement (p. 461), "I do not myself

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think that in case of the psalms the linguistic argument can be often more than a subsidiary one." He goes farther and says in his Introduction (p. xxi), "The linguistic argument is unfortunately not of primary importance in Old Testament criticism." We accept the omen. And we venture to express the belief that before the lapse of another generation some of the arguments that are deemed "of primary importance" will cease to be even "subsidiary," before the positive results of the archæologist.

What, then, are the arguments and the method of this elaborate treatise?

The order of procedure is somewhat peculiar. The author deals first with the fourth and fifth books, as they are called, and having shown, as he would claim, their late origin, he proceeds to the second and third, and closes with book first, and indeed psalm first,—literally advancing backwards.

The one underlying assumption of this entire discussion, the indispensable substratum of the whole argument, is this: The necessity of finding an historical development of evolution, the certainty that such and such thoughts and sentiments could not have appeared at such and such periods, such early periods in the history of the Jewish nation. To this settled and fast assumption the date and origin of the Psalms must be subjected; before it every counter-indication is doomed to give way, and everything supposed to be settled is to be unsettled. This assumption is, of course, but another form of the denial of the supernatural, the revealed, the miraculous, which has figured so largely as the fundamental assumption of much recent continental criticism.

This radical objection to any supernatural elevation or illumination, and insistence on mere natural historical growth, is more constantly implied than openly asserted, but occasionally appears in somewhat bald statement. Thus in his Introduction (p. xxxi), while recognizing in Ps. xvi. a

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hope of immortality, he consigns the psalm to the period after the Exile, in the following manner: "If this be pre-Exilic, nay, even if it be an early post-Exile work, it is impossible to find in it intimations of Christianity, except indeed on the hypothesis of a heaven-descended theology." "Pre-Jeremian such highly spiritual psalms [as lxi. and Ixiii.] cannot be" (p. 99). "Such ripe fruits of spiritual religion could not, methinks, have been produced in the miseries and anxieties of that period," namely of Jehoiachin, and therefore "the earliest possible date" of Ps. xxii., xxxv., and lxix. is "the period which preceded Nehemiah's first journey to Jerusalem" (p. 230). "Davidic it [Ps. xix.] cannot be; fancy the worldly-minded, even though religious, David inditing a hymn in praise of a rich and varied handbook of spiritual religion. Must one spend precious moments in dispelling this illusion?" (P. 237.) Again (p. 193), “From the point of the history of art not less than from that of the history of religion, the supposition that we have Davidic psalms presents insuperable difficulties." As a proper pendant to this dictum on the one side, take this on the other: "Even if no psalms, probably Maccabean, had been preserved, we should be compelled to assume that they had existed" (p. 15). How could the path of an investigator be made plainer and easier than by an impossibility behind him and a drawing of compulsion before him?

When our author comes to the details of his discussion, he lays down certain criteria to determine a Maccabean psalm, briefly stated by him on p. 95 thus: "(1) The presence of some fairly definite historical allusions; (2) an uniquely strong church feeling; (3) a special intensity of monotheistic faith; (4) an ardor of gratitude for a wondrous deliverance."

Now it is obvious at a glance that the last three socalled criteria, however weighted with rhetorical terms,"uniquely strong," "special intensity," "ardor," and "wondrous," have no force or bearing to show specifically the