It is, therefore, a good thing that the long-time neglect of this supplement to the Bible should be ended; and, as the wisdom-books here printed amply testify, humanity has lost through not having better acquaintance of them. Church-people have known something about them, for parts of _The Wisdom of Solomon_ and of _Ecclesiasticus_ are included in the Lectionary; but no such inadequate selection, no such casual fragments as are read in the churches, can give more than a slight idea of their particular value and importance. They hold ideals. The degree of the sublimity of those ideals is various, and depends, in measure, on the receptivity and character of the reader; but they are ideals, and uplifting, nevertheless; and at no time, in any civilisation, can ideals be dispensed with. Where no vision is, the people perish. The idea “Wisdom” meant different things to the Jews as their history made progress, and has in these books various meanings and is differently applied as the supposed needs of the nation or the individual are illustrated. No simple definition of Wisdom as lauded by Ben Sira, his grandson, or the unknown author of _The Wisdom of Solomon_ (whose wisdom certainly it was not), can, therefore, be exact or adequate. To do justice to the word in all the circumstances of its use would require a many coloured catalogue; but, taking it in its larger sense and expressing the general idea in simple English, it meant duty--duty with the implied sacrifice of self, duty associated with submission to Jehovah, “the Lord.” Not always is the wisdom of Ben Sira worthy of this lofty description--Mr. Worldly Wiseman might often quote him comfortably--but, reading the books through, it may justly be said to mean that. It was a wisdom based on centuries of hard experience. The Jews whose philosophy, Hellenised, is here expressed, had known the extremes, and pretty well all the conditions, of life; and every phase of their development--the slow pastoral age, the years of Egyptian bondage, the fighting days in Canaan, the periods of heroism, of kingship, of failure, of captivity, ending with the scattering of God’s Chosen, never to be gathered again into one local community--was remembered with burning memory, though it was not without balm. We have, then, in these books, the settled philosophy, characteristically eastern, which, while remembering the pain of the past, makes the best of present blessings.