brave enough to expose most of these impositions, and it is now the manifest duty of all public teachers and literary leaders to uphold those scholars, to protest against the continuance of the propaganda of pious frauds, and to insist upon the supremacy of truth. CHAPTER X. KOHELETH (ECCLESIASTES). In the Atlantic Monthly for February, 1897, a writer, in giving his personal reminiscences of Tennyson, relates an anecdote concerning the poet and the Rev. F. D. Maurice. Speaking of Ecclesiastes (Koheleth), Tennyson said it was the one book the admission of which into the canon he could not understand, it was so utterly pessimistic--of the earth, earthy. Maurice fired up. "Yes, if you leave out the last two verses. But the conclusion of the whole matter is, 'Fear God and keep His commandments: for this is the whole duty of man. For God shall bring every work into judgment, with every secret thing, whether it be good or whether it be evil.' So long as you look only down upon earth, all is 'vanity of vanities.' But if you look up there is a God, the judge of good and evil." Tennyson said he would think over the matter from that point of view. This amusing incident must have caused a ripple of laughter in scholastic circles, now that the labors of Cheyne, Renan, Dillon, and others, have left little doubt that both of the verses cited by Maurice are later editorial additions. They alone, he admitted, could save the book, and the charm of the incident is that the verses were placed there by ancient Maurices to induce ancient Tennysons to "think over the matter from that point of view." The result was that the previously rejected book was admitted into the canon by precisely the same force which continued its work at Faringford, and continues it to this day. Only one must not suppose that Mr. Maurice was aware of the ungenuineness of the verses. He was an honest gentleman, but so ingeniously mystical that had the two verses not been there he could readily have found others of equally transcendant and holy significance, without even resorting to other pious interpolations in the book. Tennyson was curiously unconscious of his own pessimism. When any one questioned the belief in a future life in his presence his vehemence without argument betrayed his sub-conscious misgivings, while his indignation ran over all the conditional resentments of Job. I have heard that he said to Tyndall that if he knew there was no future life he would regard the creator of human beings as a demon, and shake his fist in His eternal face. This rage was based in a more profoundly pessimistic view of the present life than anything even in Ecclesiastes,--by which name may be happily distinguished the disordered, perverted, and mistranslated Koheleth.