Fenton, "Early Hebrew Life," has, I think, given the clue through the difficulties of the jubilee-year legislation. He traces the early communal character of Hebrew society, its gradual break-up under the encroachments of manorial lords, and the natural efforts of the people to regain their communal rights. "But how remedy the evil? How restore to the communities their old rights and privileges, without unduly trenching upon rights and possessions that had since been acquired? The year of Jubilee is the Hebrew solution of the problem," (p 71). It was a compromise; the old seventh year communal right adjourned to seven times seven years, and enlarged. Fenton quotes a curious survival, in the borough of Newtown-upon-Ayr, of this very compromise between the old and the new social systems--a Scottish Jubilee. It is a queer sign of the disproportionate development of individual religion in our current Christianity, that this social and economic legislation should have been so spiritualized away as to leave no consciousness of its original character in the minds of those who sing in our prayer-meetings that "The year of Jubilee is come." [54] The Dialogues of Plato: Jowett's edition, II. 106. [55] Matthew Arnold in _Contemporary Review_, xxiv. 800; xxv. 508. [56] The Friend: Essay x. [57] Sacred Books of the East: I. ix. _et seq._ [58] Confessions of Augustine: Book X. § vi. [59] Exodus, xx. 31. [60] Richard Hooker: Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, Book I., ch. xvi. § 8. [61] Le Page Renouf: Hibbert Lectures, 1879, p. 250. [62] Hibbert Lectures, 1879, p. 279. [63] God in Christ, p. 93. End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Right and Wrong Uses of the Bible by R. Heber Newton