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obloquy, and finally drove him to starvation and death, for throwing light upon the real character of the Song of Songs; and among Catholics it was seen when Philip II allowed the pious and gifted Luis de Leon, for a similar offence, to be thrown into a dungeon of the Inquisition and kept there for five years, until his health was utterly shattered and his spirit so broken that he consented to publish a new commentary on the song, "as theological and obscure as the most orthodox could desire." Here, too, we have an example of the efficiency of the older biblical theology in fettering the stronger minds and in stupefying the weaker. Just as the book of Genesis had to wait over two thousand years for a physician to reveal the simplest fact regarding its structure, so the Song of Songs had to wait even longer for a poet to reveal not only its beauty but its character. Commentators innumerable had interpreted it; St. Bernard had preached over eighty sermons on its first two chapters; Palestrina had set its most erotic parts to sacred music; Jews and Gentiles, Catholics and Protestants, from Origen to Aben Ezra and from Luther to Bossuet, had uncovered its deep meanings and had demonstrated it to be anything and everything save that which it really is. Among scores of these strange imaginations it was declared to represent the love of Jehovah for Israel; the love of Christ for the Church; the praises of the Blessed Virgin; the union of the soul with the body; sacred history from the Exodus to the Messiah; Church history from the Crucifixion to the Reformation; and some of the more acute Protestant divines found in it references even to the religious wars in Germany and to the Peace of Passau. In these days it seems hard to imagine how really competent reasoners could thus argue without laughing in each