It is necessary before noticing the general message and appeal of these wisdom-books to revert briefly to the question of the particular place and value of the Apocrypha as compared with some of the canonical books of the Old Testament. This is not quite where it was. It is worth while to realise that. The higher criticism, as it is called, by subjecting the scriptures to the wholesome test of educated and scientific inquiry, has modified the comparative value of its component parts. Some it has illumined and strengthened; others it has proved to be of different value from that previously ascribed to them. Dreams and visions, allegories and parables, are the reasonable and helpful explanations of certain supernatural signs and wonders in the Old Testament, the literal truth of which, though hampering and perplexing to many believers of scriptural truth, would have been fiercely maintained and stoutly defended by the Bunyan type of religious warrior--and honour be to every man in that fighting company! Be that as it may, the results of the higher criticism have brought into prominence this fact, that the action of St. Jerome in shelving the Septuagint and retranslating the Old Testament from the original Hebrew, thereby excluding the Apocrypha from the place it had hitherto occupied with the canonical scriptures, entailed consequences which the translators of the Authorised Version, who followed in his steps, would, under cross-examination in these days, if such were possible, have found it hard to justify. Why, for example, I ask with profound respectfulness, should the story of the slaying of Sisera by Jael, who flagrantly broke the laws of eastern hospitality, have been accepted within the Canon, while the kindred but not so flagrant deed of Judith, the destroyer of Holofernes, was relegated to the Apocrypha? Why, too, should that beautiful poem _The Song of Songs, which is Solomon’s_, have been accepted as “establishing doctrine,” while the wisdom-books in this volume were ignored--to be neglected ever since, unread and practically forgotten by the overwhelming majority of religious people. In any case, the criticism which has questioned and diminished the value of certain books or chapters in the Old Testament has by doing so revived interest in the Apocrypha. If, here and there, its history may be unreliable and its incidents fantastic, does that necessarily weaken the value of its better parts? Certainly not; otherwise the better parts of the canonical scriptures would be so weakened also.