thinker, but addressing untutored minds, preferred to convey truth in forms borrowed from mythology. The moralists however saw the poetical and religious importance of the personification of Wisdom, and repeatedly introduced it into their didactic works (see Ecclus. i., xxiv., Wisd. vi.-ix.,[1] and comp. Bar. iii. 29-37). Sirach even takes a step in advance of his original, and at least for a moment identifies Wisdom with the Law of Moses.[2] It became indeed a tradition of Jewish exegesis (see Pirke Aboth, vi. 10) to interpret the absolute Khokma of the Tora, either in opposition to Hellenistic views of the higher wisdom, or from a practical instinct such as Wordsworth followed when in praise of Duty he employed figures which had occurred long before in the 'Praise of Wisdom,' or (a closer parallel) Richard Hooker, when he described the Scripture as one embodiment of that divine Law which he so splendidly eulogises at the close of his first book. That Jewish legalism degenerated into a mechanical formalism, should not blind us to the practical instinct in which it originated.
The title 'The Praise of Wisdom' has now, I hope, been justified. The passage quoted above forms the high-water mark of this elevated poetry, and points the way to the grand things in the poem of Job. Regularity of structure is not a merit of our treatise, but the repetitions are not feeble, and are perhaps deliberately made. The author is a didactic poet, and only after he can presume that his lessons have been assimilated will he venture on his highest flights. Does Ewald bear this in mind when he divides the book into three sections, I. a general exhortation to wisdom, in which the
- [Footnote: the creative energy. A system in which Sophia had been the dominant word
might have led to an earlier development of Mariolatry (Introduction to Proverbs in the Speaker's Commentary).]
- ↑ Ecclus. xxiv. 23. (Comp. a sublime passage of E. Irving, identifying the contents of the 'sacred volume' with 'the primeval divinity of revealed Wisdom,' Miscellanies, p. 380 &c.) According to late Jewish theology, the Law is one of the seven things produced before the creation of the world. The alphabet-fables in Talmud and Midrash, in which letters of the alphabet converse with God, pre-*suppose the same view (comp. the Mohammedan view of the Koran).
- ↑ So Milton (a Hebraist), Paradise Lost, vii. 10 ('didst play'), and again in Tetrachordon ('God himself conceals not his own recreations,' &c.)
