comparable to a selection of works from English literature
between the times of Beda and those of Milton, we have the
stratified deposits (often confused and even with their natural
order inverted) left by the stream of the intellectual and moral
life of Israel during many centuries. And, embedded in these
strata, there are numerous remains of forms of thought which
once lived, and which, though often unfortunately mere
fragments, are of priceless value to the anthropologist.
Our task is to rescue these from their relatively unimportant
surroundings, and by careful comparison with existing forms of
theology to make the dead world which they record live again.
In other words, our problem is palaeontological, and the method
pursued must be the same as that employed in dealing with other
fossil remains.

Among the richest of the fossiliferous strata to which I have
alluded are the books of Judges and Samuel.<1> It has often been
observed that these writings stand out, in marked relief from
those which precede and follow them, in virtue of a certain
archaic freshness and of a greater freedom from traces of late
interpolation and editorial trimming. Jephthah, Gideon and
Samson are men of old heroic stamp, who would look as much in
place in a Norse Saga as where they are; and if the varnish-
brush of later respectability has passed over these memoirs of
the mighty men of a wild age, here and there, it has not
succeeded in effacing, or even in seriously obscuring, the
essential characteristics of the theology traditionally ascribed
to their epoch.

There is nothing that I have met with in the results of Biblical