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HE suggestion that there are works of fiction in the Bible at one time certainly would have aroused protest, if not resentment, and it is possible that there may still linger in the minds of some a remnant of this feeling. It is largely due to two reasons. The first is an impression that the suggestion of fiction in the Bible has been invented by those who desire to eliminate from it the supernatural. Doubtless it is true that there are some critics who desire to eliminate the supernatural from the Bible, and who therefore seek to show that anything which seems to be supernatural is imaginative. This is not the scientific, it is not the literary, spirit. The true scientific spirit does not assume that there can be nothing supernatural in life; it studies life to ascertain what is in it. The truly literary spirit does not assume that there is nothing supernatural in literature; it studies literature to ascertain what is its character and what are the motive and purpose of each author. No literary critic would think of classifying the story of the resurrection of Jesus Christ among works of fiction or imagination. He might think the narrative incorrect, but he would not doubt that it belongs among historical works—that is, that the authors believed that they were narrating facts. The mere circumstance that an incident narrated in the Old Testament is extraordinary does not afford the slightest indication that it is fiction. The question whether any narrative is history or fiction is not identical with the question whether it is true or false. The literary classification of a narrative depends upon the motive of the author, not upon the accuracy of the narrative. The author of fiction gives free play to his imagination, and his work is not the less fictitious because he interweaves some historical truth with his imaginative narrative; the historian assumes to narrate facts and his work is history

despite the fact that he may be misled into the most serious errors in his narrative. Herodotus is a writer of history; although Macaulay assures us that "he is from the first to the last chapter an inventor." Dumas is a writer of fiction; although his editor affirms that "contemporary authority can be cited for any anecdote or incident not directly connected with the distinctively romantic portions of the narrative." The question whether any particular narrative in the Old Testament-the Book of Jonah, for example-is history or fiction is not to be determined by considering whether the book contains extraordinary events, but by considering the question whether its general spirit and structure are such as to justify the belief that the author thought himself narrating facts as they actually occurred, or whether he consciously gave a free rein to his imagination as he wrote.

A second reason for the objection to the suggestion that there is fiction in the Bible is a remnant of a Puritan prejudice which everywhere except in its relation to the Bible has long since disappeared. The Puritans opposed all manifestations of the imagination. They destroyed the pictured windows in the churches; took down the pictures from the walls of the houses; broke in pieces the statues in the niches; closed the doors of the theaters and forbade the drama; and banished the works of fiction from their tables. No doubt some readers of this article can remember, in their own childhood days, how novels of every description were looked upon askance, if not with absolute reprobation, in their own circles. have emerged into an epoch in which this banishing of the imagination is no longer permitted because it is no longer necessary. We admit the pictured windows to the churches; we hang pictures on the walls of our houses; we have replaced the statues even of pagan deities in their

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niches, reopened the doors of the theaters, and novels lie on all our tables. brief, we recognize the fact that imagination is a divinely given faculty, not to be suppressed, but to be freely used. Why, then, should we think it strange that God should have used the same faculty in the education of the Hebrew race? If to-day it is one of his instruments for the development of humanity, why should we think it impossible that in the olden time he should have inspired men to use their imagination for the moral and spiritual culture of the race?

In truth, the works of imagination have a very high and a very varied service to perform. Fiction is, in the first place, entertaining, and gives rest. The little child, left alone at night by the mother, whispers softly to itself a story and so talks itself to sleep; when we have lost the imagination of our childhood, we ask some genius who still retains it to tell us his story, that he may sweep out of our minds for a little while the cares and perplexities of our busy day, that in his narrative we may find rest and refreshment. Fiction is sometimes a valuable vehicle for the conveyance of instruction. It is true that there are critics who say that a work of imagination never should be didactic; but who would banish from literature Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress," or "Oliver Twist," or "Put Yourself in His Place"? because they are didactic. Some of the greatest of our novelists have writter. for the purpose of illustrating truth, moral, religious, or sociological. Fiction is descriptive and interpretative. The imagination tells us much of life with which otherwise we should be unfamiliar. If we desire pictures of old-time life, we shall find them more vivid in "Henry Esmond," "Lorna Doone," or "Quentin Durward" than in Green's "History of England;" because the novelist has a free hand with which to picture the life that he desires to set before us. If we desire to know how the other half of the world lives, we shall find it more vividly portrayed in such a novel as Walter Besant's "All Sorts and Conditions of Men than in such a statistical work as Charles Booth's "Life of the Poor in London." Fiction is interpretative of life as well as descriptive of it. The great novelist understands the principles of human nature

and portrays them--not philosophically, not psychologically, but dramatically; so that by sharing his imagination we share his understanding. If he be really a great dramatist, he realizes not only the outer life, but the moral forces which are at work in the world, and he so portrays life that those moral forces appear before us; he does not so much give instruction as impart life through the ministry of life. It would be a mistake to say that Shakespeare wrote "Macbeth to show the evils of ambition, or "Othello" to show the evils of jealousy, or Hamlet" to show the evils of irresolution; but, none the less, the great interpreter of human life could not tell the story of jealousy, of ambition, or of irresolution without making us feel, rather than see, their evil. Thus fiction not only entertains, instructs, describes, interprets, but inspires; by showing noble life, it quickens noble life in us; by showing ignoble life, it inspires us with hate against what is ignoble.

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Fiction in the Old Testament serves all these purposes. Some of these Hebrew stories are vastly entertaining. If one doubts it, let him read the Old Testament story of Daniel or Samson or Elijah to a group of children; he will find them not less interested than they would be in any story to be found in Greek or Roman literature. Some of these Hebrew stories are didactic, written for the purpose of conveying moral instruction; the parables of Christ are pre-eminently so. Some of them are simply descriptive. We get, for instance, from the account of Eliezer's courtship of Rebecca for his master's son a better picture of the way in which courtships were conducted in patriarchal times than we could possibly get from accurate history. We find in these stories, also, interpretations of life: love and jealousy, joy and sorrow, courage and cowardice, virtue struggling with vice and vanquishing it, vice struggling with virtue and vanquishing it. All this we find portrayed with moral simplicity nowhere surpassed, with dramatic power never degenerating into the melodramatic. In them all, with the entertainment, the didactic teaching, the description of external life, the portrayal of character, we find life imparted through life; that inspiration which is more than instruction. It is a mistake to think, as men of the Puritan temperament

have sometimes seemed to think, that all life comes through the intellect, and that we must understand before we can receive. A great deal comes through the sympathies, the emotions, the imagination, and through these the writer of fiction often addresses himself to us more effectively than either the historian, the philosopher, or the moralist.

A single illustration taken from the Book of Judges will serve to demonstrate to the more conservative reader that there is some fiction in the Old Testament. It is the parable of the trees, and reads as follows:

"The trees went forth on a time to anoint a king over them: and they said unto the olive-tree, Reign thou over us. But the olive-tree said unto them, Should I leave my fatness, wherewith by me they honor God and man, and go to be promoted over the trees? And the trees said to the fig-tree, Come thou, and reign over us. But the fig-tree said unto them, Should I forsake my sweetness, and my good fruit, and go to be promoted over the trees? Then said the trees unto the vine, Come thou, and reign over us. And the vine said unto them, Should I leave my wine, which cheereth God and man, and go to be promoted over the trees? Then said all the trees unto the bramble, Come thou, and reign over us. And the bramble said unto the trees, If in truth ye anoint me king over you, then come and put your trust in my shadow: and if not, let fire come out of the bramble, and devour the cedars of Lebanon."

No one will doubt that this is fiction. And yet it would be quite as possible for God to make a tree that could talk as an ass that could talk, or a big fish that could swallow a man and a man that could live three days and three nights in the belly of the big fish. There is no question of There is no question of possible or impossible with God. question always must be, not what God can do, but what it is reasonable to believe that he has done. We believe that this parable of the trees is fiction, because it has the qualities of fiction, because it is more reasonable to suppose that the author invented the story to serve as the vehicle of a moral, than to suppose that God created talking trees and brought them to gether in a quasi-political convention for that purpose. This parable, therefore, not

only illustrates the truth that there is fiction in the Old Testament, but it indicates the method by which we are to determine what is fiction and what is history. In the next article I shall retell two or three of the Hebrew stories and leave the reader to judge from the story itself, as told, whether, if he found it elsewhere than in the Bible, he would regard it as fiction or as history.

All readers recognize that the parables in the Bible are fiction; many of them are less ready to recognize its folk-lore. By folk-lore I mean the stories which mothers tell their children, and which pass from generation to generation, sometimes in later history printed, sometimes never reduced to print; all peoples have such folk-lore, and the Hebrew people had theirs. Such were some of the stories subsequently incorporated in the Book of Genesis; such some of the tales respecting Elisha; such, probably, the account of the boyhood exploits of King David; such, certainly, the story of Samson. Samson lived in the colonial days of Israel, when there was no king, and every man did what was right in his own eyes. His birth was heralded by an angelic messenger; he was consecrated to the life of a Nazarene from his cradle by his mother; he drank no wine, ate no grapes, suffered the locks of his hair to go uncut, and in his youth gave token of that extraordinary strength which has since rendered his name proverbial.

We first meet this Hebrew unheroic hero on his way to Timnath. A Philistine maiden has captured his fancy by her beauty, and, despite the law, the protests of his parents, the mission to which he is called by God as deliverer of his people, to Timnath he will go. The Philistine maiden plays the coquette with him, cajoles him out of his secret, and tells to his Philistine guests the answer to the riddle which he has proposed. To pay his wager of thirty changes of raiment he goes alone across the country and takes the raiment from a Philistine city; but his pride is wounded by the deceit which has been practiced upon him, and when the Philistine coquette marries one of the guests who had come to his betrothal, he catches three hundred jackals, ties them together two by two by the tails, fastens a firebrand to each pair, and lets them loose in the harvest season to set fire to the Philistines'

standing wheat. Then, when the Philistines, with singular injustice, visit their wrath on the bride and her father, putting her to death, Samson, with characteristic fickleness, smites them hip and thigh with a great slaughter. We next find him in the hands of more formidable foes. When the Philistines come up to avenge their wrongs on the nation which shelters Samson, and the Israelites deliver him bound into their hands, he submits with out opposition, only to break the cords. which bind him, leap upon his would-be captors with a shout, and slay a thousand of them with his own hands.

Twenty years later we meet him in Gaza, a Philistine city, whither, still yielding himself a slave to his unbridled selfwill and self-indulgent spirit, he has gone in pursuit of a Philistine woman. Philistines close the gates and set a watch to catch him at the dawn. At midnight he goes out, takes the gates and posts upon his back and carries them off, in scornful disdain of their boasted strength. Such a man, weak in the conceit of his own strength, never learns life's lessons. He falls in with another Philistine woman, sets his heart upon her, and, with a folly for which there is no palliation, walks open-eyed into the trap the treacherous Delilah has set for him. She undertakes to get from him the secret of his superhuman strength. Three times he mocks her with lying answers; three times discovers her treachery, and, despite it all, at last tells her the secret, lies down to sleep with his head upon her lap, to awake, his vow broken, his locks shaven, his strength gone, and himself an easy prey to his enemies. In servitude he learns that lesson of self-denial which he would learn nowhere else, grinds away in the prison-house of his foes, little by little gathers his strength, and in one last barbaric yet heroic effort brings down the temple of the Philistines'

god, Dagon, upon himself and upon the worshipers assembled to exult over him.

This story, found anywhere but in Hebrew literature, we should assume to be that half-fiction, half-history of which such stories in primitive literature are always composed; not only we should but we do assume it to be such; for the story of Samson in Hebrew literature and the story of Hercules in Greek literature remarkably parallel each other. To the same Semitic origin both names are traced by linguists. Both are men of extraordinary strength; of both specifically the same traditions are told; both slay a lion with their own hands; both suffer death, though in different ways, at the hands of their treacherous wives. One, a captive in Philistia, summoned to make sport for his enemies, pulls down the Temple of Dagon, and buries himself and the Philistines under its ruins; the other, a captive in Egypt, led forth to be sacrificed to Jupiter, breaks the bands which bind him, and slays the priests and scatters the assemblage. Even the custom of tying a lighted torch between two foxes in the circus, in memory of the damage once done the harvest-fields, was long kept up in Greece-a singular witness to the extent of this athlete's reputation. The modern or literary critic of the Bible, whose point of view is that given in the first article of this series, sees no reason for thinking that substantially the same stories are fiction when found in Greek literature, but history when found in Hebrew literature. The value of the stories does not depend upon their historical vraisemblance; their value is in their ethical significance. The lesson of the life is plain: muscular strength mated to moral weakness never makes a hero; the man who lacks self control can never be the deliverer or the true leader of a people.

Mara L. Pratt. Illustrated. (In Five Volumes.)
Vol. I. The Beginner's Book. D. C. Heath & Co.,
Boston. 52x71⁄2 in. 132 pages. 35c.

A simple relation of history for children's comprehension, well planned and well carried out. An American Colonel. By the Hon. Jere

Clemens. The Wolfe Publishing Co., Akron, O. 52X8 in. 315 pages.

An attempt to tell in fiction the story of Aaron Burr and of his enmity to Hamilton. The fact that the author begins such a book with an elaborate and rhetorical description of the court of Ferdinand and Isabella in 1486, and then goes on to describe the discovery of America, thus approaching from afar the portion of American history which he wishes to tell, is an indication of the crudeness shown throughout in the construction and writing of

the book.

Associate Hermits, The, and Stories. By Frank R. Stockton. (Shenandoah Edition, Vols. XIV. and XV.) Charles Scribner's Sons, New York. 5x84 in. Sold by subscription. One of these volumes contains "The Associate Hermits," the other presents some of the most widely read pieces which have come from Mr. Stockton's hand, among them "The Lady or the Tiger," "The Discourager of Hesitancy,' and the delightful paper on "The Training of Parents." This beautiful edition has now reached the fifteenth volume, although the thirteenth has not been issued, but will be published a little later.

Burial of the Apprentice, The. By Henry W. Cherouny. The Cherouny Printing and Publishing Co., New York. 52x81⁄2 in. 193 pages. Boy. By Marie Corelli. The J. B. Lippincott Co., Philadelphia. 5×71⁄2 in. 348 pages. $1.50. During the summer heat no occasion for mild amusement should be missed; hence every Dante student ought to read this author's comment on the great Florentine, strangely sandwiched between two scenes of her latest story," Boy." The story has a well-constructed plot, however, and, in the hands of a more cunning workwoman, the framework would have supported a worthier structure. Boy," alas, is largely stucco. He himself, the hero, is rather unreal. His babyhood is unlike other

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babyhoods, and at three years of age we find a precocity of observation on his part so unusual as to suggest a limited experience in observation on the author's. "Boy's" boyhood and young manhood are, as might be surmised, overwrought, weird, lurid periods of life. This is not saying, however, that "Boy" is an unhealthy story; far from it. It is a shade unnatural, although a somewhat strong shade. The characters are interesting, all of them, if they are not all attractive. The scene of the story begins in England and winds up in South Africa at the battle of Colenso in a blaze of Ouidian glare and gore.

Chronicles of Sir John Froissart. By Adam Singleton. Illustrated. (Appleton's Home Reading

Books.) D. Appleton & Co., New York. 42x7 in. 235 pages. 75c.

To open the fourteenth century to the young reader of the nineteenth this edition of Froissart is an appropriate volume. The editor has condensed into fifty-four chapters the seven hundred chapters of Lord Berners's translation; in the many unchanged sentences we have the daily conversation of a nobleman of Shakespeare's time, just as the chronicles themselves are the work of a French contemporary of Chaucer. Mr. Singleton gives the pronunciation of foreign words in foot-notes, but he adds other notes by which the thought of the reader is quickly and admirably directed -indeed, the reader is almost enabled to place himself in the position of a reader of three centuries ago.

Cornelius Nepos: Twenty Lives. Edited by John Edmund Barss. (Macmillan's Latin Series. Edited by John Copeland Kirtland, Jr.) Illustrated. The Macmillan Co., New York. 5×71⁄2 in. 316 pages. 90c.

A good working edition of the author who, next to Cæsar, is the greatest terror of schoolboys in their second-year Latin.

Flashes of Wit and Humor. By Robert

Waters. Edgar S. Werner Publishing and Supply Co., New York. 5x7 in. 186 pages. $1. The principal of the public schools at West Hoboken, N. J., has made a collection of witticisms which should commend itself to those who wish amusement, recreation, and rest. We think that the writer's best quotation lies in the story which he made a rule for himself in compiling the volume. General Grant, when one of his officers at a dinnerparty remarked, "Now I may tell my storythere are no ladies present," quickly responded: "Well, colonel, though there are no ladies present, there are some gentlemen!" History of Education, A. By Thomas Davidson. Charles Scribner's Sons, New York. 5×7% in. 292 pages. $1.

Mr. Davidson in this, his most recent work,