Page:The spirit of the Hebrew poetry 1861.djvu/57

 pretend to have authority to substitute one word for another word; or to erase a letter. Here, then, we take our hold upon a rock. Human opinion, in matters of religion, sways this way and that way, from age to age; but it is ever and anew brought back to its point of fixedness in the unalterable text of the Hebrew Scriptures. Upon this Fiftieth Psalm Esra and the Rabbis of his school commented at their best, in that age when Anaximander, Anaxagoras, Thales, and their disciples, were theorising to little purpose concerning "the Infinite;" and were in debate on the question whether it is matter or mind that is "the eternal principle," and the cause of all things:—a question unsettled as yet among our "profoundest thinkers." Upon this Psalm, with its bold, outspoken, and determinate morality, its grandeur and its power, the Rabbi of a later and sophisticated time commented also, weaving around it the fine silk of his casuistry, and labouring hard in his work of screening the then-abused conscience of his race from its force; so "making void the Word of God by his traditions." Upon this Psalm the Christian theologues, in series, from the Apostolic Fathers to Jerome and Augustine, in their comments give evidence, each in his age, at once concerning those secular variations of religious and ethical thought which mark the lapse of time; and of what we must call the restraining power of the canon of Scripture, which, from age to age, overrules these variations—calling back each digressive mood of the