the History of Israel, has been reached by a mass of
investigations and discussions of which no satisfactory general
account has ever been laid before the English reader. Indeed, even
on the Continent, where the subject has been much more studied than
among us, Professor Wellhausen's book was the first complete and
sustained argument which took up the question in all its
historical bearings.

More recently Professor Kuenen of Leyden, whose discussions of
the more complicated questions of Pentateuch analysis are perhaps
the finest things that modern criticism can show, has brought out
the second edition of the first volume of his Onderzoek, and when
this appears in English, as it is soon to do, our Hebrew students
will have in their hands an admirable manual of what I may call
the anatomy of the Pentateuch, in which they can follow from
chapter to chapter the process by which the Pentateuch grew to its
present form. But for the mass of Bible-readers such detailed
analysis will always be too difficult. What every one can
understand and ought to try to master, is the broad historical
aspect of the matter. And this the present volume sets forth in a
way that must be full of interest to every one who has tasted the
intense pleasure of following institutions and ideas in their
growth, and who has faith enough to see the hand of God as clearly
in a long providential development as in a sudden miracle.

The reader will find that every part of the "Prolegomena" is
instinct with historical interest, and contributes something to a
vivid realisation of what Old Israel really was, and why it has
so great a part in the history of spiritual faith. In the first
essay of the Prolegomena a complete picture is given of the