[314] See Nineteenth Century, Feb. 1884, p. 189.
[315] 'When from time to time,' says S. Bernard to his monks, 'anything that was hidden or obscure in the Scriptures has come out into the light to any one of you, at once the voice of exultation and thankfulness for the nourishment of spiritual food that has been received, must rise as from a banquet to delight the ears of God.'
[316] See the Annual Address (1889) delivered at the Victoria Institute by Prof. Sayce, on the cuneiform tablets of Tel el-amarna, pp. 4, 14 f.: 'We learn that in the fifteenth century before our era—a century before the Exodus—active literary intercourse was going on throughout the civilized world of Western Asia, between Babylonia and Egypt and the smaller states of Palestine.... This intercourse was carried on by means of the Babylonian language and the complicated Babylonian script. How educated the old world was, we are but just beginning to learn. But we have already learnt enough to discover how important a bearing it has on the criticism of the Old Testament.'
[317] See Driver, Crit. notes on Sunday-School lessons (Scribner: New York).
[318] Ex. xx. xxii-xxiii. xxxiii.
[319] The Books of Kings seem to be compiled from the point of view of the Deuteronomist.
[320] Origen, c. Cels. vii. 4.
[321] E.g. chs. vii. ix. The Roman Church admits that it is, to use Newman's phrase, 'a prosopopeia'; 'our Bibles say, "it is written in the person of Solomon" and "it is uncertain who was the writer,"' l.c. p. 197. It is important to bear in mind that the Western Church in general has, since S. Augustine's day, admitted into the canon a book the literary method of which is thus confessedly dramatic. Newman makes this the ground for saying that the same may be true of Ecclesiastes.
[322] On the evidence of O.T. miracles I may refer to Mr. Samuel Cox's Essay: Miracles, an Argument and a Challenge. (Kegan Paul, 1884.)
[323] Of course the distinction must be maintained in the case of the book of Daniel between a 'pious fraud' which cannot be inspired, and an idealizing personification which, as a normal type of literature, can. Further study will probably solve the special difficulty which on the critical hypothesis attaches to the book of Daniel from this point of view: see Stanton, Jewish and Christian Messiah, p. 109, note 1.