claims to be written by the great king whose name is prefixed to it. For centuries it was received as standing on the same footing as Ecclesiastes. Even now it occupies an honourable place among the books which the Church reads for "example of life and instruction of manners." No one has ever dreamt of stigmatising it as a forgery. The fact must be admitted that the quasi-dramatic personation of character as one form of instruction has been in almost every age recognised as perfectly legitimate, and that if the balance of evidence is in favour of a later date than that of Solomon, there is no ground for rejecting this conclusion on an à priori assumption that an inspired writer was necessarily debarred from employing such personation. The contents of the book present, perhaps, a yet more difficult problem than the question of its authorship. It does not present moral lessons in plain and easy language like the Book of Proverbs. It is not an utterance of devout aspirations like the Psalms, nor the proclamation of a Divine message like the writings of the prophets. Its tones are harsh, discordant, despondent. It reads like the confession of one who had wasted his life, and had no hope beyond it. Life and immortality are shrouded as with a thick darkness. It seems to anticipate that weariness of the satiated voluptuary, of the over-wrought intellect, which we are sometimes to think of as attaching to a high culture, like that of modern civilisation. Want of power to understand its drift led some of the older Rabbis to question its authority-to shut it out from the studies of the young. For a like reason it takes its place now among the lessknown and less-studied books of the Old Testament. Rightly apprehended, however, the book is of profound interest and significance. It meets the necessities of a state of mind from which, perhaps, no period of the world's history has ever been quite exempt, but to which periods, like our own, of increasing luxury and advancing knowledge are especially liable. The ever-recurring watchword of the book, "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity," speaks of bitter disappointment, in tones of which we find echoes in the poetry that expresses most powerfully our modern experiencein Shakespeare's Hamlet, in Byron's Childe Harold, in Tennyson's Palace of Art. The man has gone in quest of the chief good, and has sought for it in many ways, and retired from the search at every stage baffled and disappointed. The permanence of Nature does but oppress him with the sense of the short-lived littleness of man. Pleasure palled on the sense; magnificence and state brought no profit; wisdom, sought for its own sake, and not springing from the fear of the Lord, yielded no contentment. He hated the labour which he had taken under the sun. "Vanity of Vanities, hollowness and vexation, were written upon all things" (chaps. i., ii.). The order of the world presented, it was true, tokens of a righteous order a time for everything, for blameless joy, after the pattern of a true Epicureanism (iii. 12, 13), for righteous judgment (iii. 16, 17). But that thought, too, failed to comfort at first, for the shadow of death closed in the prospect, and, as yet, there was no vision of judgment beyond it, only the thought that man hath no pre-eminence above the beast; that all are of the dust and all turn to dust again" (iii. 19, 20). A closer scrutiny of the facts of man's life around him did but make the problem more insoluble. Sympathy with the oppressed, indignation against the oppressor, were better than the selfish pursuit of pleasure, with which the seeker after happiness had started; but there was no clue to guide him through the labyrinth, and what he saw did but leave on him the conviction that death was better than life; that the experience of other men was like his own, and that everything under the sun was vanity (iv. 2-7). Changes of dynasties, rashness and hypocrisies in worship, the increase of goods that brings increase of trouble, and gives nothing to the possessor but the beholding of them with their eyes-all these taught the same lesson. Length of days, seeming prosperity, was to him, as to the old Greek poets, no safeguard against a disastrous end. It was better not to be at all than to lead a life so profitless (v., vi.). There came, however, at this stage, the dawning of better things. A "good name" was "better than precious ointment" (vii. 1). Conscience and self-respect were quickened into a new, though as yet struggling, life by the seeker's sympathy with suffering; and with this there revived also the sense of the preciousness of wisdom, not now as merely speculative, but as including patience, calmness, the equal balance of temper at either extreme of fortune (vii. 9-14). The man learnt to see that the first condition of wisdom was to fear God (vii. 18); that its first fruits were the consciousness of the sin that cleaves to all men, even to the just (vii. 20); of the ignorance which hems in man's search for knowledge on every side; of the uprightness of man's nature as designed by God; of the "many inventions" by which man has swerved from that uprightness (vii. 23-29). So far there had been a clear and definite progress; but the book, true to human experience, reproduces the oscillations and wanderings of thought of one who has not as yet set his feet upon the rock which remains unmoved, though the waves foam and dash around it; and so we find a return of the old melancholy. "Vanity" is still written on all things. Mirth within reasonable limits seems the highest good attainable, but those limits are fixed by the deepening conviction that it never can be well with the wicked, "because he feareth not God," that it shall be well with those that do fear Him (viii. 11-13). The consciousness of God, so to speak, is growing stronger; a righteous scorn of evil is taking the place of cynical indifference. And with this there is a greater readiness to accept even the apparent disorder of the world as having a divine order underlying it. The "poor wise man who delivered the city" may be slighted and forgotten; kings may be negligent or corrupt, "servants may be set upon horses;" but the wise man will yield to the ruler, and will not curse the king, nor pour out his passion in a multitude of words (ix. 15; x. 4-7, 20). Revolution brings no remedy. Government of any kind is better than absolute anarchy. The wise man can, in the midst of that imperfect order, | evangelist, apostle, should have found a place in the find opportunities for doing good, and "cast his bread upon the waters," and "in the morning sow his seed" (xi. 1-6). Activity in good works is the natural and divinely-appointed remedy for the gloom and melancholy of scepticism. Even this, in the absence of the life and immortality which was not then brought to light, was not enough to remove the sense of the nothingness of human life. Death, with all its physical phenomena, the failure of sight and hearing, the silver cord loosed and the golden bowl broken, with all its attendant pageantry, the mourners going about the streets, is still a dark and dreary thought; but there is at least a gleam of hope in the belief, however faint and indistinct, that when "the dust shall return to the earth as it was," the spirit shall "return to God who gave it" (xii. 1-7). The burden of the seeker's strain, the burden which weighs heavily on his soul, is not yet removed. "Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher; all is vanity." But much has been gained, though not all. The seeker has found, at least, a higher law of life than that with which he started; a deeper conviction that the order of things, in which he recognises God's work, does indeed make for righteousness, and by that law he is content to live himself, and is eager to proclaim the "acceptable words" to others. "Fear God, and keep His commandments, for that is the whole duty of man' -all, i.e., that makes man truly man. "For God shall bring every work into judgment, with every secret thing, whether it be good, or whether it be evil." 991 Such, I believe, is the plan and teaching of this strange enigmatic book, which, as we read it, we feel to be as true to the sad and dreamy scepticism of our own time as it was to that of the man who wrote it, more than two thousand years ago. The Two Voices of Tennyson present a parallel more or less close to its alternations of mood and thought; and I am constrained to confess that that poem and the Palace of Art, to which I have referred above, have helped me more to understand its teaching than the exegesis of many commentators. If at first it seems strange that a book so different, in its questioning and half-desponding tone, from the writings of lawgiver, psalmist, prophet, 1 The italics show that the word "duty" is not in the Hebrew. Literally, we might render, "all that becomes a man.” canon of Scripture, we may yet recognise in those who so placed it a wisdom higher than they were themselves conscious of. The mental and spiritual disease for which it provides a remedy, is not peculiar to any one age or race, is not excluded by the prevalence of any religious system. It recurs in the nineteenth century after Christ in nearly the same form as it had presented itself, it may be, a thousand years before. The man of pleasure, the man of money, the statesman and the controver sialist, each wearied with that to which he has given his life, finds in it still the echo of his own experience. Renan, judging of St. Paul by what he himself would have done, had he been in St. Paul's place, pictures to himself the old age of the Apostle, as that of one who found that he had been living for a dream and delusion, and who, after his youth and manhood had fed upon the words of the psalmist or prophet, after he himself had written what was to occupy a like place with them in the veneration of mankind, fell back after all upon Ecclesiastes-the words of the Preacher-as the one book that satisfied him, and helped him to meet the problems which vision and revelation failed to solve. As applied to St. Paul personally, that picture of the brilliant Frenchman is, of course, simply ludicrous, but it is not the less true that many who have been students of St. Paul's writings, and admired his life, and traced the controversies that have grown out of them, may yet, in the presence of doubts which they cannot put away, find refuge in its teaching. It is one of the signs of the times, in part helping us to understand how M. Renan could have adopted a notion that seems so monstrous, that Mr. Matthew Arnold, who claims to be the true expositor of St. Paul's mind and heart to the men of this generation. should have reproduced substantially the teaching of Ecclesiastes. So far as he is an ethical teacher, he is the Koheleth of the nineteenth century. We may hope, much as we may shrink from the contrast which his teaching presents to the mind of Christendom, and, we must add, to the mind of Christ, that he, too, may have borne, not altogether in vain, a witness for the law of righteousness, and the "sweet reasonableness" of Jesus, and given men who were in the abyss of despair and doubt a stepping-stone on which to rise out of it. the ancient name of Phoenicia, and the word Kenaan is found on a coin of Laodicea, whereon that town is called "a mother city of Canaan." The name Canaan was not, however, long confined to this limited area, for it was applied at different times to districts of varying extent. The earliest mention of its limits is in Gen. x. 19, where we are told that "the border of the Canaanites was from Sidon, as thou comest from Gerar, unto Gaza; as thou goest, unto Sodom, and Gomorrah, and Admah, and Zeboim, even unto Lasha;" and in Numb. xxxiv. 2-12 the boundaries are more definitely fixed as extending from the wilderness of Zin on the south to the entrance of Hamath on the north. At present, however, we must confine our attention to the country known as Phoenicia, a name derived, according to some, from poivis, “a palm-tree," according to others, from Phoinix, the founder of the Phoenician race. Phoenicia proper was probably the tract originally called Kna, including Tyre and Sidon, but at a later period it embraced the more extensive district from the mouth of the Orontes to the "ladder of Tyre," including the colonies of Aradus (Arvad), Tripoli, and Beirut (Berytus). Josephus calls Mount Carmel a "Tyrian mountain," and states that Cæsarea was in Phoenicia. Ptolemy makes the river Chorseus, south of Tantura (Dor), the southern boundary; and Strabo includes Cæsarea, Joppa, and the whole coast of Philistia within the limits of Phoenicia. The eastern boundary is nowhere defined, but the country probably did not extend far beyond the narrow strip of plain along the coast and the lower spurs of the mountainrange of Palestine. Laish, which under its later name of Dan became famous as the northern limit of the Jewish nation, appears to have been an isolated colony; at any rate, its capture by the Danites does not seem to have caused any complications between the Jews and the Phoenicians. The narrow coast-plain commences about four miles north of Latakiyeh (Laodicea) and extends to Tarabulus (Tripoli); between the last-named place and Tartus (Antaradus) it expands into a fine open plain, the Junia, whence an arm of some width stretches towards the south-east, and is connected with the Bukaa, or valley, between the two Lebanons, by an easy pass up the Nahr el-Kebir (River Eleutherus), possibly "the entrance of Hamath." South of Tripoli the mountains approach the coast, and as far as Beirut the road lies either along the beach or over the rugged spurs of the main range of Lebanon; one of which terminates in a fine bold cliff, crowned by a Maronite convent, the present Ras es-Shuka and the Theoprosopon of Strabo. The projecting headland of Beirut is level or slightly undulating, with sand-hills on the southern side, which are constantly encroaching on the town, and swallowing up mulberry-gardens and houses; southward from these sand-dunes a narrow level tract stretches along the coast till we approach Sidon, where the hills again close in, but after crossing the river Auly they sweep round to the east, leaving a broad undulating plain behind the town of Sidon; still farther south, the hills return to the shore for a short distance, and then again recede behind Tyre, till the plain is terminated by the Ras el-Abiad, or "White Promontory," a cliff of white chalk projecting into the sea, which may perhaps dispute the title of "Ladder of Tyre" with the Ras en-Nakurah, about three miles to the south. The narrow undulating tract between Beirut and Ras el-Abiad is called by Josephus "the great plain of the city of Sidon;" its average width is about a mile, but behind Sidon the hills recede to a distance of two miles, and in rear of Tyre to a distance of five miles. Phoenicia presents a marked contrast to Palestine in the number and size of the perennial streams and rivers by which it is watered; in the north, between Aradus and Tripoli, is the Nahr el-Kebir (Eleutherus), one tributary of which has been identified by Dr. Thomson with the Sabbatical River of Josephus, which was said to flow only on the seventh day; Pliny, however, states that it ran for six days, and was dry the seventh. At the present day there are many reports current respecting the river; it would appear to flow, as a rule, every third day, but, like many intermittent springs, the source from which it derives its supply is greatly influenced by the rainfall. A few miles south of Jebeil is the Nahr Ibrahim, River Adonis, which derived its name from Adonis, who was supposed to have been killed in the neighbouring mountain; on the anniversary of his death the river was believed to become a blood colour, and the water still acquires a ruddy tinge when heavy rains have brought down a quantity of the red soil on its banks: this feature, alluded to by Lucian and Maundrell, did not escape the notice of Milton when writing the lines "While smooth Adonis from his native rock At a higher The next river is the Nahr el-Kelb, or Dog River, the ancient Lycus, a rapid mountain stream which runs to the sea through a fine gorge about seven miles northwards from Beirut. At this point the mountains touch the coast, and a road has been artificially cut in the rock, over a cliff from eighty to one hundred feet above the sea; this road is, if we may trust an existing inscription, the work of the Emperor Aurelius. level there are unmistakable remains of a much older road, which has been cut at one place through a layer of bone brescia, containing the bones of many animals now extinct in Palestine. On the face of the cliff above are a series of tablets, traces of Egyptian and Assyrian inscriptions, but unfortunately so defaced that, with the exception of one, which is said to record the passage of Sennacherib on his return from his first campaign against Hezekiah, not a word can be deciphered. These monuments possibly commemorated the successful passage of this difficult place by the several Egyptian and Assyrian armies during the constant wars in which the two countries were engaged. North of Beirut, the Nahr Beirut, or Majoras, flows to the sea hard by the traditional scene of St. George's A fight with the dragon; and south of the same town is the Nahr ed-Damur, the ancient Tamyras. North of Sidon, the Nahr Auly, or "pleasant Bostrenus," gives life and fertility to the plain; and between that town and Tyre, the Khasimiyeh, or Leontes, discharges the drainage of the great plain of ColeSyria into the sea. short distance south of Tyre, a cluster of large fountains of clear good water, called Ras el-Ain, bursts forth from the plain; the water, which rises to the surface with great force, was raised to a certain level by a series of circular or octagonal reservoirs, similar to that previously described as existing at Et Tabigah, on the shore of the Sea of Galilee, and was then carried away by aqueducts to the ancient city of Tyre. There are a few points which should be noticed with regard to Phoenicia : the smallness of the territory in comparison with the influence which it exerted on the history of the world, as in the similar cases of Palestine, Greece, and Italy; the secluded character of the country, shut in on the east by the range of Lebanon, which secured it for a long period from invasion, and turned the attention of the people to maritime rather than to land enterprise; and the number and convenience of its harbours, quite large enough for the requirements of ancient navigation, when compared with the southern coast of Palestine. The soil of Phoenicia, though now uneultivated, is rich, and lemons,oranges, figs, pomegranates, apricots, &c., grow in great luxuriance, (From a Photograph taken for the Palestine Exploration Fund.) JAFFA. whilst the neighbouring forests of Lebanon formerly supplied abundant timber for ship-building, and the cedar which was used by Solomon when building the Temple. We have previously alluded to the close intercourse that probably existed between the Phonicians and the northern tribes, the mixed state of society, and the possible effect which such intimate relations had upon the introduction of idolatry amongst the Israelites; and may here notice the intimacy between Solomon and Hiram, and the marriage of Ahab with a daughter of Ethbaal. Until the reign of David the Israelites do not seem to have engaged in commercial enterprise, but the conquest of Edom by that monarch gave them the command of Ezion-geber, on the Gulf of Akabah, and in the reign of Solomon we find the Phoenicians engaged with the Jews in making voyages to Ophir, and participating in the profits derived from them. When, however, at a later date Jehoshaphat attempted to restore the trade in the Gulf of Akabah, the Phoenicians were not allowed to take any part in the undertaking. In the 27th chapter of Ezekiel there is an interesting account of the trade of Tyre with the surrounding nations, amongst others with Judah and the land of Israel, from which were imported "wheat of Minnith, and Pannag, and honey, and oil, and balm" (ver. 17). If we may infer from this that the Phoenicians derived their chief supply of grain from their Hebrew neighbours, it will explain |