Again, should the distinction between the apocryphal and canonical books of the Old Testament be emphasized as it is by many? Should a sharp line be put between the two, as though the one class, with the period it belonged to, were characterized by the errors and anachronisms of its history; the other by simplicity and accuracy; the one, by books written under fictitious names; the other, by the power to distinguish truth from falsehood or by honesty of purpose? Should the one be a sign of the want of truthfulness and discernment; the other, of religious simplicity? Can this aggregation of the Apocrypha over against the Hagiographa, serve the purpose of a just estimate? Hardly so; for some of the latter, such as Esther and Ecclesiastes, cannot be put above Wisdom, 1st Maccabees, Judith, Baruch, or Ecclesiasticus. The doctrine of immortality, clearly expressed in the Book of Wisdom, is not in Ecclesiastes; neither is God once named in the Book of Esther as author of the marvelous deliverances which the chosen people are said to have experienced. The history narrated in 1st Maccabees is more credible than that in Esther. It is therefore misleading to mark off all the apocryphal works as _human_ and all the canonical ones as _divine_. The divine and the human elements in man are too intimately blended to admit of such separation. The best which he produces partakes of both. The human element still permeates them as long as God speaks through man; and He neither dictates nor speaks otherwise. In the attributes claimed for the canonical books no rigid line can be drawn. It may be that the inspiration of their authors differed in degree; that the writer of Ecclesiastes, for example, was more philosophical than Jesus, son of Sirach; but different degrees of inspiration belong to the canonical writers themselves. Undue exaltation of the Hebrew canon does injustice to the wider Alexandrian one. Yet some still speak of “the pure Hebrew canon,” identifying it with that of the Church of England. We admit that history had become legendary, that it was written in an oratorical style by the Alexandrian Jews, and was used for didactic purposes as in Tobit and Judith. Gnomic poetry had survived in the book of Sirach; prophecy, in Baruch and the Epistle of Jeremiah, though here the language is already prosaic. Imitation is too observable in the matter and manner of the Apocrypha. They have parallels, however, among the Hagiographa, which originated in an age when the genuine breath of prophetic inspiration had ceased; when history and prophecy had degenerated; so that the transition from Esther and Malachi to Judith and Baruch, as also from Proverbs to Wisdom, is not great.