Take Latin literature: with the standing exception of his Pollio, Vergil's message to his countrymen, in striking contrast to his greater follower Dante, was not a message of hope; and who can really hear it even when Horace is in his gayer moods? It is much the same with the greater prophets of Greek literature. Euripides cannot be cleared of melancholy, even if it is not permanent in him; while most critics would regard Sophocles as frankly pessimistic. Pessimism was in the air, and these great writers, feelers after God as they might be, not only sympathized with it, but expressed it, and in expressing it gave it what nobility it could receive, but a nobility only of diction and phrase.

Hope, then, is at once the symbol and safeguard of the Christian life. It is to the soul what good health is to the body; when its possession is fitful and precarious, then decay has set in.

Nor must it be supposed that the acute and final state of despair is reached in a moment. It has its preliminary stages both for individuals and nations. It is not at once wild, passionate, suicidal. In normal experience it is preluded by a thousand haunting doubts and uncertainties, by misgivings, suspicions, by those μepíuvai against which the Master also warned His own. Gradually resistance against these forces becomes weaker and weaker until the pessimist drifts into the backwater of a sluggish and stagnant morbidity, and this way lies despair. Hence the motto for Christians in this regard must be obsta principiis. They must needs set a watch not only upon lip, but upon mood and temperament. They must look to springs of thought and will, and shun as a fatal and ominous sign what they flatteringly describe as religious depression. They have also to beware of the surroundings and influences of an age which to-day is once again pessimistic, and whose most fatal note is an increase in suicide. Modern thought is tinged with pessimism. If it is too negative to serve as a

doctrine, it is insinuated as an idea. Modern fiction, by which people to-day learn at once so much and so little, is largely pessimistic. It is so with the two chief novelists still with us. Life and character in the North of England and in Wessex have been severally delineated for us by them with a power which rivals, and now and again transcends that of George Eliot; and while the one writer exposes, as with the hand of a man, the weakness of human nature, the other as pitilessly sets out its evil passions. Where in

either is the fair vision of hope? It is the same in the poetry of the day. Critics describe it as decadent, but they are not to be blamed for so doing. Pessimism, like a creeping paralysis, has caught hold of our singers, and their listeners love to have it so. They pass by the lark; it is only the raven to which they are responsive. It is a happy thing for the welfare of our national existence that the patriotic feeling, in the present sorrowful crisis of English history, has come upon us, acting like an antiseptic upon these maleficent influences.

The rendering of R.V., "never despairing," wisely covers the possibility of either variant in this passage.

It remains, therefore, to consider whether Christians worthy of the name act up to the Master's command. What doubt, what gloom often besets them as they reflect upon themselves, on their influence with others, on the great cause which is not theirs but His!

Upon themselves. The inward monitor, when permitted to speak out, declares to them shortcomings, inconsistencies, faults and sins. All imply failure to advance, and then, instead of nerving themselves to further struggles onward, knees become feeble and hands slack, the gloom of despondency settles about them; hope is no longer sure and strong, they are on the edge of despair.

So in regard to others. We often give up others, not only because they sometimes seem to us hopelessly bad,

but because they are often to us hopelessly uninteresting. Thus the area of our influence narrows to a smaller and yet smaller radius.

So in regard to Christian enterprise. It is so often that Christians imagine that the general success of the great cause of the Lord is to be measured by the personal success at their command. Rather it is their single title of honour, whether success comes or goes, to be fellow-workers with Him. Meanwhile, how is a dark and dismal pessimism consistent either with a full belief in His message or with His Divine Person, for the one is the word of hope, and the other is the Hope Himself?

Now when they were gone over the stile, they began to contrive with themselves what they should do at that stile, to prevent those that shall come after from falling into the hands of Giant Despair. So they consented to erect there a pillar, and to engrave upon the side thereof this sentence: "Over this stile is the way to Doubting Castle, which is kept by Giant Despair, who despiseth the King of the celestial country, and seeks to destroy His holy pilgrims." Many therefore that followed after read what was written and escaped the danger.

So wrote the immortal author of the Pilgrim's Progress. It was Hopeful who this time saved his brother. One of Bishop Westcott's last utterances was, "I am full of hope." The spirit of all whose faces are set to the Celestial City must be the same, and their battle cry a nobler one than any dreamt of by the poet's imagining.

NIL DESPERANDUM, CHRISTO DUCE ET AUSPICE

CHRISTO.

B. WHITEFOORD.

225

THE LISTS OF THE TWELVE TRIBES.

THE twelve 66 sons of Jacob, or the twelve tribes of Israel, are mentioned together and by name some twenty times in the Old Testament and once in the New. The contents of these lists vary slightly. At times Levi is one of the twelve, at times not. When Levi is omitted from the list as a tribe apart, the number twelve is completed by dividing Joseph up into Manasseh and Ephraim. This is well known. It is less generally observed that in Genesis we have another early variation: Levi and Joseph both appear, but the twelfth place, subsequently occupied by Benjamin (as yet according to the story unborn), is filled by Jacob's daughter Dinah-a small tribe, as we may conclude, whose misfortunes, related mainly in the form of a personal narrative1 in Genesis xxxiv., were followed by early extinction. In Revelation vii. the place left vacant by Dan is filled by Manasseh, though Joseph occurs later in the list. Another curious method of completing the number twelve is found in the book of Jubilees xxxviii. 5 ff.; the place of Joseph, who is absent in Egypt, is there taken by Hanoch, the eldest son of Reuben (cf. Gen. xlvi. 9).

2

The first of the more familiar lists is obtained by combining Genesis xxix. 31-xxx. 24, and xxxv. 16 ff. These are the well known narratives of the births of Jacob's children; and in them the children are naturally mentioned in the exact order of their birth. They are never again mentioned in this order in the Old or New Testament.3 The twelve children fall into four groups-the children of Leah, of Rachel, of Bilhah, and of Zilpah.

1 But note that the tribal character of Jacob comes out clearly in v. 30.

2 Cf. Steuernagel, Die Einwanderung der israelitischen Stämme in Kanaan (1901), p. 3.

3 Nor so far as I have observed elsewhere, except of course in other stories of the births (Josephus, Ant. I. 197 218; Jubilees xxviii. 11 ff., xxxii. 3.

VOL. V.

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Into the interpretation of the narratives of the births, into the historical conditions which occasioned the theory of the order of births of the tribes and their distribution among different mothers, I do not propose to enter here. The subject has been quite recently discussed afresh by Dr. Steuernagel in the extremely suggestive essay cited above. My purpose is different, and is entirely independent of any particular interpretation of the meaning of the birth stories-be they the stories of the births of individuals or of the early fortunes of tribes.

I intend to limit myself to the examination of certain literary phænomena-the variations, not so much in the contents as, in the order of the contents of the various lists. The correct understanding of even this limited subject appears to throw some light on various critical and exegetical matters.

I have already said that the twelve tribes of Israel are never mentioned in the order in which the twelve sons of Jacob are said to have been born. But further, though the twelve tribes are not mentioned more than about twenty times altogether in the Bible, there are some eighteen different orders in which they are mentioned, and we find yet fresh differences of order when we turn to the Pseudepigrapha, Philo and Josephus. There is, indeed, but one arrangement that is ever repeated in the Bible, and that only occurs thrice, viz. in Numbers ii., vii. and x. 14–29.

And yet the arrangement of the names is very seldom, possibly never, haphazard. My purpose is to tabulate the various arrangements, to consider the rules that govern them and to indicate certain conclusions to which they point.

The lists1 fall roughly into two classes; there are, first,

1 Some of the lists are confined to the Western tribes. But for our present purpose neither this nor the omission in some of Levi calls for any further specific reference.