1. THE Book of Wisdom has many claims on our attention and respect. Whatever views we may adopt as to its date and author (matters which will be discussed later), we may confidently assert, that, occupying that period between the writing of the Old and New Testaments, when the more formal utterances of the Holy Spirit for a season had ceased to be heard, and, as far as remaining records attest, God had for the time ceased to speak by the prophets, it possesses an absorbing interest for every student of the history of Christianity. In conjunction with other writings of the same period, this Book exhibits the mind and doctrine of the Jews, the progress of religious belief among them, and the preparation for Christianity which was gradually being effected by the development of the Mosaic creed and ritual. The gap between the two covenants is here bridged over. Herein is presented a view of the Hebrew religion, definite and consistent, which may well be regarded as a necessary link in the chain of connection between the earlier and later revelations. Nowhere else can be seen so eloquent and profound an enunciation of the faith of a Hebrew educated away from the isolating and confining influence of Palestine, one who had studied the philosophies of East and West, had

1 Lately the Rev. J. H. Blunt has published The Annotated Bible, London, 1879, vol. ii of which contains the Apocrypha, and

learned much from those sources, yet acknowledged and exulted in the superiority of his own creed, and who, having tried other systems by that high standard, had found them to fail miserably. Nowhere else can be read so grand a statement of the doctrine of the immortality of the soul as the vindication of God's justice. The identification of the serpent who tempted Eve with Satan, the reference of the introduction of death into the world to the devil, the typical significance assigned to the history and ritual of the Pentateuch, the doctrine of man's freedom of will exerted in bringing upon himself the punishment of his sins, and the sure retribution that accompanies transgression,-in treating of all these subjects, the Book is unique among prechristian writings, and its neglect or omission cannot be compensated by any other existing work.

It is remarkable how greatly this Book has been disregarded in England. While the Fathers have quoted it largely and continually, while commentators in old time delighted in plumbing its depths and in finding Christian verities underlying every page, while in later days Germany has poured forth a copious stream of versions and comments, England has been till lately1 content with the single work of R. Arnald, and has

the Rev. W. R. Churton has prepared an edition of the Book of Wisdom for the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge.

left the Book unstudied and uncriticized.

Familiar as some of its chapters are to all English churchmen from their forming some of the daily and festival lections in the Calendar, no student of Holy Scripture has seemed to think the Book of Wisdom worth serious labour, and it has been left for other nations to bestow upon this remarkable work that diligence which it deserves and will well repay.

2. Before entering upon an examination of the text of the Book of Wisdom, some preliminary inquiries are necessary for determining its place in the history of religious development and its connection with preceding and subsequent systems. If, as we shall show reason hereafter for asserting, the work was produced at Alexandria, and is a genuine offspring of the Jewish-Alexandrian school which took its rise in that celebrated centre of commerce and philosophy, a short space must be devoted to an investigation into the origin, tenets, and influence of that school. To trace at length its effects in producing gnosticism and other heresies in Christian times is beyond the scope of this outline, which aims only at recording its rise, and making a brief examination of the question, whether the Gospel owes any of its doctrines to this system.

If we make a distinction between Theology and Philosophy, we must say Theology has to do with faith, Philosophy with research. Philosophy claims to systematise the conceptions furnished by Theology and Science, and to provide a doctrine which shall explain the world and the destiny of man'. The basis of Theology is revelation; this principle Philosophy ignores, and casting away the help thus offered endeavours and claims to elucidate the phenomena of the universe by analysis and generalisation.

Let us see first what progress the purely heathen

Greek Philosophy made towards solving the great problems of being, and next how it fared when combined with a belief in revelation.

The history of Greek Philosophy may be divided into three periods, the Pre-Socratic, the Socratic, and the Post-Socratic 2.

Involved in a polytheistic religion, the earliest Greek philosophers attempted in vain to explain the mysteries around them by the agencies of the deities in whom the poets had taught them to believe. Failing to construct any satisfactory theory out of these elements, Thales and the Ionic school tried other expedients. At one time water, at another time fire, at another air, became in their view the cause of life and power, the substance, as it were, of which all phenomena were only the modes. The utmost development at which these Physicists arrived was to endow this primary element, be it air or other substance, with intelligence, making it in fact equivalent to a soul possessed of reason and consciousness. Anaximander (B. C. 610) held that "The Infinite' (rò neрov) was the origin of all things. What he meant exactly by this term it is perhaps impossible to discover; but being a mathematician, and prone to regard abstractions as entities,' he was led to formulate a distinction between all Finite Things and the Infinite All.' But this 'Infinite All' was not developed into the idea of Infinite mind till the school of the Eleatics arose.

Meantime the interest of the history centres itself upon the mysterious and justly celebrated Pythagoras, the great founder of the Mathematicians. He was a lover of Wisdom for its own sake, not for the practical purposes to which it may be applied; hence it was perhaps that he adopted the study of numbers as best able to draw the mind away from the finite to the

1 Lewes, Hist. of Philosophy, I. xviii. ed. 1867. In the following brief sketch of Greek Philosophy I have chiefly followed Mr. Lewes.

2 Zeller, Die Philosophie der Griechen, i. 111 ff.

3 Ὁ τῆς τοιαύτης ἀρχηγὸς φιλοσοφίας. Aristot. Met. A. c. 3.

Thales is considered to have been born about B. c. 636. Ritter, Hist. of Ancient Phil. i, bk. III. chap. 3. pp. 195, ff. Eng. trans. Mosheim's trans. of Cudworth's Intell. Syst. i. pp. 35, 147.

Lewes, Hist. of Philos. i. 15.

infinite, from the sensible to the incorporeal.

In them he saw the principles of things, the cause of the material existence of things1. All numbers resolve into one: all parts can be reduced to unity. All that we see around us are only copies of numbers, and numerical existence is the only invariable existence. And as this is the farthest point to which we can conduct our speculations, One is the infinite, the absolute, the apx" which is the object of the philosophers' search. We must remember that with Pythagoras numbers were not, as with us, mere symbols, but real entities 2; we can thus readily conceive the meaning of his littleknown theory. The doctrine of the transmigration of souls attributed to him is based on the same principle. The soul is One and perfect. Connecting itself with man it passes into imperfection; and according as one or other of its three elements, νοῦς, φρὴν, θυμὸς, rule, so is the man's scale in creation, rational, intelligent, sensual, so are the bodies which it may successively inhabit; but these changes are merely phenomena of the monad, the one invariable essence.

Unsatisfied with the answer to the problem of existence given by others, Xenophanes (B. C. 616) fixing his gaze on the vast heavens determined that the One is God. The position which he maintained is found in a couplet of his which has been preserved:

Εἷς θεὸς ἔν τε θεοῖσι καὶ ἀνθρώποισι μέγιστος,
οὔτε δέμας θνητοῖσιν ὁμοίος οὔτε νόημα.

He may be considered the apostle of Monotheism, the teacher, amid the corruptions of the prevalent belief in multitudinous gods, of a faith in one perfect Being, though he could not tell who or what this being was, and looked upon all things as manifestations of this one self-existent, eternal God. His Monotheism was in fact Pantheism. But his speculations opened the

1 Toùs ȧpilμoùs eivai râs ovσías. Aristot. Metaph. i. 6. ap. Lewes, i. p. 28; Grote, Plato, i. pp. 10, ff. (ed. 1865); Mosheim's Cudworth, i. pp. 567, 570, notes.

2 See the point argued against Ritter by Lewes, Hist. of Phil. i. pp. 30, ff.

way to scepticism, led men to think that nothing could be known as certain.

5

Parmenides (B. c. 536) followed in his train, affirming that the only truth is obtained through reason without the aid of the senses, and that nothing really exists but the One Being. These two distinct doctrines, the latter of which was but little in advance of his predecessors, compose his system. This was supported by his pupil and friend Zeno of Elea (B. C. 500), the inventor of Dialectics, who, indeed, added nothing new, but contributed a mass of arguments, sophisms, and illustrations, many of which are more ingenious than solid, but which are valuable and interesting as being the earliest instances of that formal logic which plays so important a part in all subsequent discussions.

The immediate precursors of Socrates and his school were the Sophists, but the intermediate tenets of some other philosophers, especially of Democritus and Heraclitus, the so-called laughing and weeping philosophers, demand a passing notice. The men themselves may be mythical, but there is a germ of truth in all myths, and the story of these two represents doubtless a real step in the progress of inquiry. Heraclitus (B. C. 503) rejected the idea of reason being the sole criterion of truth, and held that the senses rightly educated are never deceived. Error springs from the imperfection of human reason, not from the falsity of the information or ideas derived from sensation. Perfect knowledge dwells with the universal Intelligence, and the more a man admits this into his soul, the more secure is he from error. The principle of all things is Fire, ever changing, moving, living, and out of the strife of contraries producing harmony. Democritus too (B. C. 460) upheld the truth of sensation, but sensation controlled by reflection (diávola); and he was the first to answer the question of the modus operandi of the senses by the sup