Note 153 — INTRODUCTION. (continued 2)

“But, after all, the great objection remains to any conclusion drawn from the pantheistic mystic poets, whether of Persia or India, whether Mahometans or Hindoos, namely, that their productions are founded on a religion and philosophy entirely different from the Jewish. The Canticles are productions of a different country, and separated from any of the songs of the Sufi poets by an interval of nearly two thousand years. The Jewish religion has nothing in common with the pantheistic mysticism on which those songs are founded. There is nothing in the Old Testament of a similar character. If any production similar to those mystical love-songs had existed in the religious literature of the Hebrews, undoubtedly we should have found some in the Book of Psalms, which comprises compositions from the age preceding that of David to a period long after the return of the Jews from the captivity at Babylon. But in the most fervent Psalms, the forty-second, for instance, nothing of the kind is found. Neither is anything similar to those mystic songs ascribed to the Jewish sect, as described by Josephus and Philo. Nothing of the kind is laid to the charge of the Essenes. It is needless to say, that nothing approaching to the like character is found in the New Testament. Nothing similar is discovered even in the allegorical paraphrase of the Targumist on the Canticles. All those religious love-songs are founded on the Sufi religion, or rather religious philosophy, which, whether it was borrowed from India, as Von Hammer supposes, or arose independently among the Mahometans, according to the opinion of Tholuck, has no connexion with, or resemblance to, the Jewish. It is as different from the latter as darkness from light. The argument, therefore, which is drawn from the mystical songs of the Mahometan devotees for ascribing a mystical character to the Canticles, is without foundation.”153