“No more shall it be said to thee, Thou forsaken! And no more shall it be said to thy land, Thou desolate! But thou shalt be called, The object of my delight, And thy land, The married woman; For Jehovah delighteth in thee, And thy land shall be married; For the young man shall marry the virgin; Thy children shall marry thee; And with the joy of a bridegroom over his bride Shall thy God rejoice over thee.” Jer. iii. 20:— “As a wife faithlessly departeth from her husband, So have ye acted faithlessly towards me, O house of Israel! saith Jehovah.” These, and several more of a similar kind, are the passages referred to, to prove that the bridegroom and bride in this Song mean the Lord and his people! How totally different is the strain of thought and expression in those passages to that in the Song! In the former, the wedded-relation forms the comparison; in the latter, ante-nuptial love is the theme. In the former, the general idea of the figure is briefly used, without any particulars of the accompaniments; in the latter, particulars of the persons, dresses, scenery, are largely described. In the former, God is represented as the High and Holy One inhabiting eternity, and, in his infinite condescension and compassion, loving, with the tenderness of a husband, Israel, who is represented as an unlovely, ungrateful, and unfaithful wife; in the latter, the bridegroom and the bride are placed upon an equality, nay, the bridegroom declares that his heart has been ravished by the charms and faithfulness of the bride. In the former we are distinctly told that the husband means the Lord, and the wife the people of Israel, so that the most superficial reader is compelled to perceive it; in the latter we have no intimation whatever that the lovers are intended to represent God and his people, and no reader would ever gather it from the poem. This will appear all the more forcible when we remember that, supposing this poem to be a description of the covenant-relation subsisting between God and his people, it contains the completest representation of this kind. We should, therefore, naturally expect that subsequent writers, employing the same figure, would borrow something of the imagery and colouring from it. But, so far from this being the case, there is not the slightest analogy between the strain of thought and expression of this poem and that of subsequent writers. Fourth. The 45th Psalm, which is supposed to celebrate, allegorically, the union of the Messiah and the Church, has been adduced as analogous to the Song of Songs, and therefore an evidence in behalf of the allegorical interpretation. “If we admit,” says Hengstenberg, “the allegorical interpretation of this Psalm, we shall also be obliged to drop the literal meaning of the Song of Songs.”