Page:The spirit of the Hebrew poetry 1861.djvu/68

 affirmed, to truths or principles to which no abstract terms or combinations of terms can ever be adequate.

Yet there are some purely technical conditions in submitting to which the spontaneous language of feeling, or the severe utterances of abstract truth, can hardly be granted to stand wholly exempt from a real disadvantage. There may, indeed, be approvable reasons, warranting the employment of such artificial means—albeit they do involve a disadvantage; nevertheless, where we find it existing, it must be accepted as it is—it is a conditioning of Thought which, when it is admitted on occasions the most serious, indicates the extent of that adaptation of the Divine to the human of which we can never lose sight without falling into perplexities.

With the exception of two or three lines—cited by St. Paul from the Greek poets—the Scriptures of the New Testament are everywhere prosaic in form:—the intention of the writer or speaker is conveyed always in the most direct manner which the rules of language admit of—figurative terms are employed where none other are available. Thought is here unconditioned, so far as it can be—the subject-matter, considered. Not so in the Scriptures of the Old Testament. Nearly a half of the entire mass, or, in the proportion of twenty-two to twenty-five, the Hebrew writings are not merely poetic, as to their diction, but they are metrical in form;—or we