This "Wisdom of Solomon" probably appeared not far from the first year of our era. It is written in almost classical Greek, is full of striking and poetic interpretations and spiritualisations of Jewish legends, and transfused with a piety at once warm and mystical. Solomon is summoned much in the way that the "Wandering Jew," Ahasuerus, is called up in Shelley's "Prometheus," yet not quite allegorically, to testify concerning the Past, and concerning the mysteries of the invisible world. He has left behind his secularist Proverbs and his worldly wisdom; but though he now rises as a prophet of otherworldliness, not a word is uttered inconsistent with his having been a saint from the beginning, albeit "chastised" and "proved." In fact he gives his spiritual autobiography, which is that of a Son of God wise and "undefiled" from childhood. His burden is to warn the kings and judges of the world of the blessedness that awaits the righteous,--the misery that awaits the unrighteous,--beyond the grave. The work impresses me as having been written by one who had long been an enthusiastic Solomonist, but who had been spiritually revolutionised by attaining the new belief of immortality. It does not appear as if the apparition of Solomon was to this writer a simple imagination. Solomon seems to be alive, or rather as if never dead. "For thou (God) hast power of life and death: thou leadest to the gates of Hades, and bringest up again." "The giving heed unto her (Wisdom's) laws is the assurance of incorruption; and incorruption maketh us near unto God: therefore the desire of Wisdom bringeth to a Kingdom." The Jewish people idealised Solomon's reign long before they idealised the man himself; and indeed he had to reach his halo under personified epithets derived from his fame,--as "Melchizedek," and "Prince of Peace." The nation sighed for the restoration of his splendid empire, but could not describe their Coming Man as a returning Solomon, because the priests and prophets,--a gentry little respected by the Wise Man,--steadily ascribed all the national misfortunes to the shrines built to other deities than Jahveh by the royal Citizen of the World. Thus grew such prophetic indirections as "the House of David," "Jesse's branch," and finally "Son of David."