which came up from the washing; whereof every one bear twins, and none is barren among them"; or why he should declare, "Thy neck is as a tower of ivory; thine eyes like the fish-pools in Heshbon, by the gate of Bath-rabbim; thy nose is as the Tower of Lebanon, which looketh towards Damascus." Of course, to parody a phrase of Voltaire's, the Holy Ghost was not bound to write like Alfred Tennyson, but, if intended for human guidance, one would think the divine meaning should be a little more apparent. The truth of the matter is, an allegorical interpretation has been forced into the Song of Solomon in order to relieve the Holy Ghost from a charge of indecency. Grotius ventured to call the Song of Songs a libertine work. Even the orthodox Methodist commentator, Adam Clarke, earnestly exhorted young ministers not to found their sermons on its doubtful phrases. He knew how apt religious people are to mix up carnal desire and appetite with love to their blessed Savior, and was perhaps aware that a number of Christian hymns might appropriately have been addressed to Priapus.* * See Rimini's History of the Moravians and Southey's Life of Wesley* vol. i. pp. 188, 387. In the Jewish Church no one under the age of thirty was permitted to read the Song of Songs, a prohibition which may have assisted to give it its sacred character. It is, nevertheless, not more indelicate than many other portions of God's Holy Word, and viewed in its proper light as an Oriental dramatic love poem, although it cannot be acquitted of outraging modern notions of decency, it is not, I think, so much, as some other portions of the Bible, open to the charge of teaching immorality. On the contrary, its purpose is commendable. An attentive reading of the Revised Version, which is without the misleading headlines, and is divided to indicate the different speakers in the love drama, will make this apparent, and show this little scrap of the Jewish national literature to possess a certain natural beauty which has been utterly obscured by the orthodox commentators who, from the time of the early fathers to Hengstenberg and Keil, have sought to associate it with Christ and his Church.