Page:The spirit of the Hebrew poetry 1861.djvu/82

 Greatly do we often miscalculate the relative credibility or incredibility of passages in ancient writings. No logic—or no sound logic—can make it appear incredible that God should raise the dead; or that He should make the waters of the sea to stand up as a heap; or that, in any other mode, the should show. But utterly incredible would be the pretension that any congeries of events, such as are usually packed together by a poet with a definite artistic intention, has ever actually had existence in the current of the world's affairs. Utterly beyond the limits of reasonable belief would be the supposition that a man— even one of ourselves—has ever acted and spoken, from year to year, throughout his course, with unfailing consistency, or in that style of dramatic coherence which the contriver of a Romance, or of an Epic, figures for his hero. No such embodiment of the Ideal has ever, we may be sure, broken in upon the vulgar realities of human existence;—there have been good men, and brave men, and wise men, often; but there have been no living sculptures after the fashion of Phidias, no heroes after the manner of Homer or Virgil.

Then there comes before us another balancing of the incredible and the credible:—as thus. The Hebrew Poets—it is not one or two of them, but all of them in long series—have abstained from those idealizings of humanity at large upon which the poets of other nations have chosen to expend their powers.