Page:The spirit of the Hebrew poetry 1861.djvu/129

 is pledged under conditions which are, in the simplest mode, ritual, and which, while they assure the worshipper in his approach to God, restrict him also.

The Patriarchal man knew that he had forfeited terrestrial immortality, and that his years on earth were numbered; and yet, in the place of a now-undesirable endless life, there was given him—longevity; and beyond it, a far more distinct vision of the future life than modern Sadducean criticism has been willing to allow. This length of years—a stipulated reward of piety—and this more than a glimmer of the life eternal, imparted a dignity to the modes of thinking, and to the demeanour and carriage of those "Sons of God" who, each in his place, stood, toward all around him, as Chief, and Prophet, and Priest. Life under these conditions—beneath the heavens—a life, inartificial and yet regal—a course abhorrent of sordidness, and thrift, so realized itself during a lapse of centuries, as to have become a Pattern Idea, the presence and influence of which are conspicuous in the cherished sentiments and in the literature of modern and western nations.

To its rise in the Patriarchal era may be traced that one conception, which might be called the Ruling Thought, as well of Art, as of Poetry—the Idea of. Order, symmetry, beauty, security, conscious right and power, are the constituents of this Idea. When embodied, or symbolized in Art or in Poetry, it is this Repose which is the