lot, and whose children represent the apostate Israelites. Through a succession of chapters he paints the human provocations, the Divine wrath and relenting; the weak and fleeting repentance of Israel like the morning dew; the vain substitution of ritual for worship undefiled; the occasional falls into an actually consecrated indulgence (which possibly Ashtoreth's worship, though I believe not Baal's, might prompt); the fruitlessness of appeasements so unworthy, and the final weariness of even God's compassion; until, in disappointment at finding Judah little better than Samaria, the book closes upon the commenced, if not completed, tragedy, with promises to such of the people as will repent, and the Prophet's aspiration that they may be many.

In modern language, this is a poem of conscience or a sermon, rather than a prediction. It reads the moral lesson of events passing before men's eyes, and reveals the mystery of history, by turning that side of the curtain which is Providence. Still, as in Amos, God does nothing in the theatre of the world, but he takes gifted spirits, his servants and prophets, behind the scenes, and reveals the instruction of the drama. No proof can be given, that any event absolutely future when the writing was published, is therein foretold. The moral certainty of this conclusion is not lessened by doubts about the precise meaning of a few passages, for what is important is clear.

It has been asked, did God command such a marriage as that of Hosea and Gomer? Or did the Prophet, swayed by his own impulse, and associating it in imagination with the apostasy of Israel, contract an equivocal connexion, and see in it a picture of the falling away of the nation? Rather, is the alliance with Gomer a parable, such as our manners shrink from, but not too highly figurative for the Hebrew mind? One more question may be asked, as a possible, though fanciful, suggestion. Since the title which

has "Hosea son of Beeri," may be indefinitely later than the book, and the name of Hosea may be considered to occur but once in the first verse, is the last king of Israel, whom God, ordering all things by his secret word, had suffered to wed his fallen people, as an adulterous woman, here intended as the person bidden to contract the marriage? If such an imagination were admitted, we should no longer have the name of the writer of our book, but he would remain one of the most gifted of the sons of the Prophets, known to man only by the work which he did for God. A strong reason against this fourth supposition, in spite of the tempting support which such names as Gomer (completion), Lo-ruhama (unpitied), lend it, is the command repeated and intensified in the third chapter, where the Prophet no longer describes the agent in the third person, but in the first. Even if this were explained by some event in the Prophet's family, or by a symbolical adaptation of the primary image, the supposition would have an air of paradox.

If voices are counted, the majority of interpreters, and specially those of the stricter Patristic school, Cyril of Jerusalem in the 4th century, and Dr. Pusey in our own time, have thought it most reverent to make the Prophet describe a literal action. The principle of authority, as injunction, seems thus preserved; and if Revelation be by our external senses, and Morality have no measure, but Divine Ordinance, the command sanctifies the act, "Deo jubente, nihil turpe est," as Jerome imagines the defenders of this view saying. Two great interpreters, Jerome of old, with his readiness to turn inconvenient facts into figures, and Calvin, with his strong intellect and pure conscience, have set themselves on the figurative side. Illustrating his case by Jeremiah's journey in a figure to Babylon, Jerome says, "Illud in typo, quia fieri non potuit; ergo et hoc in typo, quia "si fiat, turpissimum est." In a similar strain, but with

more force, Calvin urges the unlikelihood of such a command, its repugnance to the spirit of Levitical sanctity, and its offensiveness to the popular conscience. While one reads Calvin one is convinced; yet the question occurs whether the picture of morals suggested by the Old Testament implies that the Hebrews would have been repelled, as other ages and races are, by such an example. No language is so unveiled as the Hebrew in describing animal things. The invention of names for marriage and conjugal duty may be claimed by Rome, Britain, perhaps Etruria, never by Palestine; the Romans, even in their degeneracy, noted the licentiousness of the Semitic races; the histories of the Patriarchs, Judges, and Kings, confirmed by the unconsciousness of the writers, forbid us to assume delicacy of symbol as indispensable to the Prophets. Can we, then, without a painful shock, imagine the human passion here mingling with the Divine parable? The answer to this question depends upon the degree in which we conceive the servants of God of old to have preserved their spontaneous agency and correspondent infirmities in the execution even of sacred missions. The unminced coarseness of language throughout Hosea's writings might justify an affirmative answer. If we shrink from it, we may fall back on the authority of Jerome and the reasoning of Calvin. Without for a moment thinking coarseness a mark of innocence, or desiring to consecrate the shortcomings of religious writers, I incline to the mere Parable view, as an adequate interpretation, and on the whole, as the most probable one.

The extreme difficulty of Hosea is in parts, and not in the whole. It arises partly from his abrupt genius, which rejoices in transition from indignation to tenderness, leaving the reader's instinct to supply the suppressed links of reasoning. Partly it is forced upon the Prophet, by the awkward divisions of our chapters, which seem habitually

to end in the middle of a sentence. The largest allowance for the jealousy with which familiar associations are regarded, will, I trust, not prevent the sincere reader from acknowledging some improvements on this head in the present version, even if some of the changes should appear doubtful. I must venture to take one step farther. Not only our modern arrangement of chapters, but the anticipation of it involved to some extent in the ancient Hebrew portions for reading and the Masoretic punctuation of sentences, appear to me in Hosea eminently questionable. That rhythmical balance, or recurrent echo of thought returning upon itself with varied expression, the perfection of which we have in the Psalms, appears to me not to have been developed in Hosea's style, but to have been occasionally introduced by editors whose ears had been formed on the liturgical cadence of the later Prophets and Psalms. His thoughts do not uniformly move in mental couplets, though the germ of such movement is there. His stream is continuous, though broken into waves. The proof of such a theory, if it can be proved, lies in the sequence of thought, and may be tested by the English reader. I do not know that any previous critic has made this remark, but am gratified to find in particular passages of the learned Ewald's version confirmation of the inductions which led me to it. The fourth chapter, vv. 4, 5, and the three latest chapters will supply instances for comparison. On the other hand, where the rhythm required restoration, I have restored it, as with advantage, I trust, in ch. iii. 15 [A.V. iv. 11]. It was a great pleasure to me to feel justified in softening the apparent harshness of viii. 14, by comparison of the context, into a cry for pity, like Christ's lamenting over Jerusalem. To many readers I hope this may be a relief.

The minute variations in Hosea are numerous. In the famous text "Israel called out of Egypt," ch. x. 1, I have followed religiously the Hebrew, and the context. Bishop

4

Kidder's Boyle Lecture will supply the most tolerable defence of the curious application (perhaps ornamental,) in our first Gospel. In the hardly less celebrated "calves of our lips," ch. xii. 14, I have preferred the Greek; not as thinking it supernaturally attested by its citation in the Christian Epistles (Hebr. xiii. 15), but because Hebrew idiom forbids a noun to stand unsoftened, as calves, in construction before another quasi-genitive, while a transfer of the final mem,, as a preposition to the following word gives grammar and sense. In some cases doubtful, but unimportant, especially the by

ON HIGH, (it can hardly mean the Most High), of ch. vi. 16, and x. 7, I have translated a text guarded by legitimate jealousies from needless conjecture.

Some passages in Hosea are open to special consideration.

i. 4. It is remarkable that in reviewing from the outset the scenes which provoked his country's fall, the Prophet fixes his eye on Jehu's murder of Ahab's sons and Baal's worshippers as the beginning of the series. Elisha counselled that murder: probably Elijah designed it. Were there factions, or opinions, as of York and Lancaster, among the Prophets? Or did the later learn from experience, that revolution and massacre, though prompted by zeal, sow a harvest of blood? Let the reader decide. The commands of Omniscience seem not mutable by contingencies; though man's conception and embodiment of them may vary. It may be our own error which would separate by lines of geometrical demarcation the floating compound of Divine impulse and human execution or which assumes the existence of separate historical regions, in which either of the two must be alternately exclusive or excluded.

We have in i. 10-13, not the least striking of the pas