longer. It is important to follow the way in which this change gradually happened, and the thing ceased to rest there. Israel's original perception was true: Righteousness tendeth to life![1] It was true, that the workers of righteousness have a covenant with the Eternal, that their work shall be blessed and blessing, and shall endure for ever. But what apparent contradictions was this true original perception destined to meet with! What vast delays, at any rate, were to be interposed before its truth could become manifest! And how instructively the successive documents of the Bible, which popular religion treats as if it were all of one piece, one time, and one mind, bring out the effect on Israel of these delays and contradictions! What a distance between the eighteenth Psalm and the eighty-ninth; between the Book of Proverbs and the Book of Ecclesiastes! A time some thousand years before Christ, the golden age of Israel, is the date to which the eighteenth Psalm and the chief part of the Book of Proverbs belong. This is the time in which the sense of the necessary connexion between righteousness and happiness appears with its full simplicity and force. The righteous shall be recompensed in the earth, much more the wicked and the sinner! is the constant burden of the Book of Proverbs; the evil bow before the good, and the wicked at the gates of the righteous![2] And David, in the eighteenth Psalm, expresses his conviction of the intimate dependence of happiness upon conduct, in terms which, though they are not without a certain crudity, are yet far more edifying in their truth and naturalness than those morbid sentimentalities of Protestantism about man's natural vileness and Christ's imputed righteousness, to which they are diametrically opposed. 'I have kept the ways of the Eternal,' he says; 'I was also upright before him, and I kept myself from mine iniquity; therefore hath the Eternal
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