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 CHAPTER VIII.

THE RELIGIOUS VALUE OF THE BOOK OF PROVERBS.

It is only in modern times that the Book of Proverbs has been disparaged; the early Christian Fathers considered it to be of much ethico-religious value. Hence the sounding title, first used by Clement of Rome (Cor., c. 57), [Greek: hê panaretos sophia]. From our point of view, indeed, the value of the book is different in its several parts, but no part is without its use. Can any Christian help seeing the poetic foregleams of Christ in the great monologue of Wisdom in chap. viii.? Dorner may be right in maintaining that the idea of the Incarnation cannot have been evolved from Hebraism or Judaism, and yet the description of Wisdom, 'sporting with Jehovah's world' and 'having her delights with the sons of men' (viii. 31), cannot but remind us of the sympathetic, divine-human Teacher, who 'took the form of a servant.' How deeply this great section has affected the theology of the past, I need not here relate. Will it ever lose its value as a symbolic picture of the combined transcendence and immanence of the Divine Being?

Turning to the other parts of the book, do they not furnish abundant justification of that type of Christianity which accepts but does not dwell on forms, so bent is it upon moral applications of the religious principle? Do they not show that the 'fear of the Lord' is quite compatible with a deep interest in average human life and human nature? The Book of Proverbs, taken as a whole, seems to supply the necessary counterweight to the psalms and the prophecies. The psalmists love God more than aught else; but must every one say, 'Possessing this, I have pleasure in nothing