home almost too tired to eat. Above all, when in the evening the girl has an hour or two of leisure, she requires suitable recreation to keep her from undesirable amusements and the dangers of the streets. To provide for this urgent need, a hostel for working girls has been built at Holly Mount, and two of the sisters put in charge of it. The hostel accommodates more than sixty girls. They pay a certain sum weekly for their keep; and this with the aid of frugal management makes the hostel self-supporting. Each girl has her private cubicle with a small wardrobe, while the bright dining-room and the sitting-room with its piano, gramophone, library, etc., ensure a considerable amount of home comfort. The girls are allowed a good deal of freedom. They enjoy their own social life, their weekly gatherings, dances, tea parties, etc. The hostel, which was built by the sisters twelve years ago, has proved a great success, and is one of the most characteristic features of the establishment.

Thus the Holly Mount Orphanage, which without suggesting any comparisons we have in the title of the present sketch ventured to describe as ideal, is a self-contained and complete institution. The organization is thorough in every stage of the child's up-bringing; and the methods eminently practical. It takes charge of the child from infancy to womanhood, and continues to exercise parental care long after the young woman has left the home. The good sisters, who seem to realize the Christian ideal of reverence as well as love for the poor of Christ, succeed, largely as a result of that deeply-rooted habit of thought, in turning those children of the slums and the Protestant workhouses into girls and women fitted to occupy and sometimes even to adorn any position in life, full of self-respect, and a sense of responsibility, and trained to becoming manners, such as one might suppose could only come from the careful hometraining of a Christian mother.

England is a Protestant country, just as Ireland is Catholic. Yet in the heart of darkest England we find such a truly Catholic institution as Holly Mount, in which

destitute and abandoned children, while getting a thoroughly Christian training, are educated efficiently for after life. In Ireland, on the other hand, we have many non-Catholic institutions ready, in a similar way, to take charge of the same class of infants, even those belonging to Catholic parents. But the unhappy little ones, while getting an excellent education for this world, are deprived of the priceless inheritance of their Catholic faith. It seems a very strange anomaly that there is not a single voluntary Catholic institution in Catholic Ireland able to take complete charge of the abandoned little ones of Christ from earliest infancy, and bring them up to manhood or womanhood according to Catholic ideals.

E. CAHILL, S.J.

THE LITERAL INTERPRETATION OF THE CANTICLE OF CANTICLES

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BY REV. J. H. POWER, O.P.

EADERS of the Scripture have doubtless often wondered why the Canticle of Canticles, seemingly such a profane work, ever came to occupy a position among the Sacred Books. On a cursory perusal, it does, indeed, seem strangely out of place. It appears to stand apart, especially from the Wisdom Literature with which it is classed. At first sight it presents no points of likeness with the other prophetical writings. Its moral tone and matter alike seem at variance with the Christian concept of a divinely-inspired book. Yet, despite the fact that the letter' of the Canticle is so profane as to have appeared to some ancient interpreters to border on the licentious, its Canonicity is fully authenticated by both Jewish and Christian Tradition. And although the name of God is never once mentioned, or even the remotest allusion made to things sacred, the almost unanimous voice of Tradition vouches for the supremely sacred character of the Canticle.

This very profane exterior has placed at least one great obstacle in the way of interpreters, by disconnecting the Canticle from the rest of Scripture. Even the nuptial union of which it treats failed in the circumstances to suggest a detailed comparison with the parallel places of prophecy. The principle of analogy seemed to have no place here. A superficial comparison with the prophetical writings only served to increase the difficulty. It revealed the fact that the similar nuptial imagery used by the prophets, at times even more crudely than in the Canticle, obviously clothes sacred doctrine. The prophet has always

been careful to give the key to his parable by introducing some sentences in a proper sense. The letter of the Canticle is, on the contrary, profane from first to last. If it is viewed apart from the rest of Scripture there is nothing in the context to indicate that it must be interpreted as a mere figure. The way was thus open for two extreme views. Rational criticism from the earliest times frankly accepted the Canticle in the letter as an inspired tribute to mere natural love. A great number of Christian interpreters, both ancient and modern, seemed justified from the traditional viewpoint in going to the opposite extreme, and completely abandoning the letter. As a consequence they were compelled to interpret the Canticle in the light of a very general knowledge of the Scriptural significance of the nuptial figure. The results of their efforts to emphasize the sacred import of the Canticle was a dogmatic and unfounded allegorism. All the details were forced, against both the context and the laws of analogy, to yield a meaning with reference to some particular phase of the union of Jehovah with Israel from the commencement of sacred history.

It must evidently be admitted that the letter' of the Canticle is profane. Against this we have the established fact of its inspired and, consequently, sacred character. Faced by this problem we are convinced that on the whole it is easier to establish the sacred meaning of the poem by comparison with the other prophetical books, taking the imagery as the obvious point of contact, than to explain how the Jews-the jealous guardians of the deposit of revealed truth, and the best qualified judges of the nature of the work-could have admitted it into their Canon, had they even a suspicion of its purely profane character. the event the Canticle, examined by the light of parallel prophecy, proves to be a very solid and important link in the chain of prophetical revelation.

In

It is practically impossible to give any coherent idea of the different systems of literal interpretation, or to appreciate their value, without a preliminary survey of the

senses of Scripture visualized by the various authors and schools. St. Augustine, after Origen, has emphasized the necessity for drawing a clear distinction between the material 'senses' or significations of words-the 'sound of the letter,' as Origen calls it-and their formal meaning as intended by the author in a given context. The so-called material senses as such are all represented in the word-sign or phrase, which is susceptible of as many meanings or interpretations as the word or phrase has been employed in human speech to convey. The formal element is that one definite meaning which the sign is used to express in the context. To arrive, therefore, at this formal sense intended by the author, one alone of the many possible significations the words may have, must be definitely selected. If the connexion between the sign and the sense is immediate, the sense is said to be proper, sensus proprius. Where the connexion is only indirect, and through the introduction of some other figure or sign, we have the figurative or transferred sense, sensus translatus. In the phrase 'God created man' the sense is immediately conveyed by the words taken as they sound, and consequently 'proper.' But in the proposition, 'God formed man from the slime of the earth the connexion is made by interposing the figure of a worker in clay. The words are therefore to be understood in a figurative sense. Both phrases express the same literal truth. In exegetical terminology, consequently, the proper and figurative senses are both referred to as the 'literal' sense, i.e., the meaning found in the letter of Scripture as opposed to the typical sense which is a meaning hidden in the matter. And in as far as the literal sense is known and expressed by the human author in any passage of Scripture, it is also known to exegetes as the 'historical' sense. Besides this historical sense, known and intended by the human author of Scripture, there is in the Old Testament another fuller meaning latent in the letter, and intended only by the Holy Spirit.

According to the teaching of St. Thomas following the Fathers, the Old Testament as a whole is fulfilled' in the

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