>'^R > /'< ¥?«^ t-'S^ ^>' "1 <(v. -^ V^ ^i^ ?\'>- s*~^' ;^\ ^«^:^^§s».^^^i^^^^y5>ssv-£s.t-B£ii^^^^i^ssMJ^^ L T B R A^ R Y Theological Seminary PRINCETON, N. J. Shelf Boo/.- BX 9848 .M64 1876 Miller, Matthew R The luminous unity THE LUMINOUS UNITY, LETTERS ADDRESSED TO THE REV. A. GUINZBURG, A RABBI OF BOSTON, MAg;?^ FROM THE REV. MATTHEW R. MILLER, ON THE QUESTION, IS UNITARIANISM, AS OPPOSED TO TRINITARIANISM, A PRINCIPLE OF HEATHENISM RATHER THAN OF SPECIFIC JUDAISM? : inx I nin> •irn'?^ riin> htjf\p'i yiivf "Ye believe in God, believe also in me." — Yeshua ha Notseri. " For had ye believed Moses, ye would have believed me : for he wrote of me.' -Yeshua ha Notseri. "The Comforter is in the sacred volume." — John Quincv Adams. SECOND EDITION. PHILADELPHIA: J. B. LIPPINCOTT & CO, 1876. Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1873, t>y J. B. LIPPINCOTT & CO., In the Office of the Librarian of Congress at Washington. Lippincott's Press, Philadelphia. CONTENTS. PAGE Introduction S LETTER I. The Plurality of the Divine Name Adonai ..... 9 LETTER IL The Trinitarian Character of the Tetragrammaton .... 19 LETTER IIL " Declared to be the Son of God with Power, — by the Resurrection from the Dead" .......... 46 LETTER IV. The Plurality of the Divine Name Elohim (God) .... 60 LETTER V. Unitarianism more Mohammedan than either Christian or Jewish . 71 LETTER VI. Trinitarianism as a Practical Doctrine — The Trinitarian Relations of Faith, Hope, and Love 86 LETTER VI L Analysis of the First Chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews . . 113 3 4 CONTENTS. LETTER VIII. PAGE Tlie Epistle to the Hebrews the True Exponent of Ancient Judaism 138 LETTER IX. General Review of the Argument — Objections answered . . 167 LETTER X. The Spirit of the Lord and his Word, — Isa. lix. 21 . . . . 189 APPENDIX. A Dissertation on the Book of Job 219 Questions designed to assist in the Study of the Foregoing Letters 234 We Pass Away 259 INTRODUCTION. The following letters originated in a plan that Dr. Guinzburg and myself should write letters on the subject of unitarianism, one for it and the other against it ; that our letters should be equal in number, and should be published both in The Israelite, of Cincinnati, and The Episcopalian^ of Philadelphia. The first five of the fol- lowing letters appeared in The Israelite, with as many letters in reply to them.. These five are here somewhat changed and enlarged ; and five others are added. This is done partly out of deference to the strongly expressed wish of the rabbi that this discussion should not stop, and partly because I have been pursuing the subject with increasing interest and rapture; and I trust that a good service will be accom- plished in rendering the doctrine of the Trinity much clearer to many Christian minds and highly-educated in- tellects than it now is. The arguments in these letters can be very successfully followed by one who is not acquainted with the original languages of the Bible ; but such a reader will find the study rendered much more easy if he will here carefully impress on his memory the following verses, as they here receive a rendering nearer to the original text than they have in the Authorized Version, and a i^w explanations of 6 INTRODUCTION. words. The memory ought, at the start, to have a com- plete possession of the following items. Deut. vi. 4: "Hear, O Israel: Jehovah our Elohim is one Jehovah." The Divine naine here occurring twice is the tetra- grammaton ; and such is its supreme holiness that no strictly pious Jew ever reads it aloud. It is never pro- nounced in the synagogue. Gen. XV. 2 : "And Abram said, AJonai, Jehovah, what wilt thou give me, seeing I go childless?" Gen. xviii. 1-4: "And Jehovah appeared to him in the plains of Mamre : and he sat in the tent door in the heat of the day. And he lifted up his eyes and looked, and, lo, three men stood by him ; and when he saw, he ran to meet them from the tent door, and bowed himself toward the ground, and said, Adonai, if now I have found favor in thine eyes, pass thou not away from thy servant. Let now a little water be fetched, and wash ye your feet, and rest ye under the tree." Ex. vi. 2, 3: "And God spake unto Moses, and said unto him, I am Jehovah. And I appeared unto Abraham, unto Isaac, and unto Jacob by El Shaddai, and by my name J^ehovah was I not known to them," Ex. iii. 13, 14: "And they shall say to me, What is his name ? what shall I say unto them ? "And God said unto Moses, / will be that I tvill be : and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I will be hath sent me unto you." Ex. XV. 2 : " My strength and song is Jah." Ex. xvii. 16: "And he said, that, the hand being on the throne of Jah, war is to Jehovah against Amalek from generation to generation." Ex. xxxiv. 6: "And Jehovah jiassed by before him, and proclaimed, Jehovah, Jehovah, El, merciful and INTRODUCTION. 7 gracious, long-suffering, and abundant in goodness and truth; keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin." Solomon's Song viii. 6: "A vehement flame of Jab." Zech. xiv. 9 : "And Jehovah shall be King over all the earth ; in that day Jehovah shall be one, and his name one." El, a name in the singular number, translated, God. Shaddai, also of the singular number, translated, Al- mighty. Eloah, another word of the singular number, trans- lated, God. Elohim, properly the plural of Eloah, is of very common use, being generally the original word where "God" is in the translation. The questions at the close may be useful to classes or students who have selected the book for a careful study. Recently, an Israelite in England, after he had pub- lished some articles against Christianity, wished to resume the subject, and gave the following reasons, among others. His article appeared in the ycwish Chronicle, which, I suppose, is published in London. The following is an extract : " Some of our Christian opponents will not, however, admit that they have made any attack upon us, nor allow that the controversy which we are engaged in is to be considered as a war : they prefer to regard it as a debate of friends in council, who are earnestly seeking after light and truth. They assure us that they do not come among us to annoy us with their arguments and cause dissension in our families ; they are only actuated by a generous desire to promote our welfare and guide us into the way of salvation. Very good : we will accept the sincerity of their declaration, and are quite disposed to meet them in 8 * INTRODUCTION. this way. We will not regard them as enemies, but as mistaken friends. Our controversy shall be not a hostile conflict, but an amicable conference; and thus the objec- tion to it which has been advanced by the upholders of peace and harmony cannot possibly have any force. It is true that any discussion whatever, conducted in a bad spirit, and from which more heat than light is produced, may be wisely hushed ; but when men reason calmly with a sincere desire to remove misunderstandings on each side and arrive at the truth, they cannot fail to obtain some good result ; and those who would arrest their well- directed efforts must clearly be acting from ignorance and timidity. Honest argument, by conveying knowl- edge from mind to mind, awakening reflection, and demonstrating that there is more than one side to every question, so far from causing or prolonging human quar- rels, is the only means of bringing them to a satisfactory close. Friendly controversy is the best reconciler and peacemaker that we have in the world." I look on this extract as a choice gem set in my Intro- duction. M. R. M. THE LUMINOUS UNITY. Is Unifarianism, as opposed to Triiiitarianism, a Principle of Heathenism rather than of Specific Judaism ? LETTER I. Esteemed Friend : — '' If I remember correctly, it was once written by you, and published, that the Son of God and the Holy Ghost, as Trinitarians view them, are as foreign to genuine Juda- ism as are the false deities of Olympus. Maimonides, I suppose, has said just the same thing ; for we find in the Talmud, the Amsterdam edition, in his comment on the Mishna, at the close of Abodah Zarah, the following memorable sentiment : ^^ And know,^' says he, " that this people who go astray after y^esus, even though their laws are different, all of them are the worshipers of idols, and their festivals all of them are forbidden, atid it is proper to behave ourselves towards them according to our rules of behavior towards the worshipers of idols. ' ' I desire most respectfully to say to you that this opin- ion of Christianity appears to me severe ; and I would ask if it ought not to give way, in this age, to a view more charitable. It is, most assuredly, an opinion both ex- tremely uncharitable and essentially untruthful, if it can be proved that the great watchword of Israel, the Shemah Yisrael, that verse which you consider the most weighty and sublime in the Bible and in all your liturgy (Deut. vi. 4) — '^ Hear, O Israel : the Lord our God is the Lord otie'^ lo THE PLURALITY — both sustains and expresses trinitarianisrn equally with the unity of God.* I propose to address some letters to you on this point which I have just mentioned, expecting that both your letters and mine will be published in two reli- gious papers, The Israelite and The Episcopaliaii. I will first invite your attention to the Divine name Adonai, which occurs twice in the public reading of this text as the substitute of the tetragrammaton, and which is uttered so very frequently in the public worship of the synagogue, and With such emphasis, as, for instance, in the reading of the psalm, I — ''The voice of Adonai is upon the waters," "The voice of Adonai is powerful," — "The voice of Adonai is full of majesty," — "The voice of Adonai divideth the flames of fire," — "The voice of Ado7iai shaketh the wilderness," — that any stranger having witnessed the service once may well make it his first question, afterwards, what Adonai means, which ap- peared to be resounding through all the service. I will * One anecdote is too interesting to be omitted. It is one of the many incidents told to Dr. Bonar while he was in Jerusalem for a few days. It occurred there. " One of the missionaries entered a synagogue one day. A rabbi was preaching. The moment he saw the missionary enter, he stopped, and shouted at the height of his voice, Shemah Yisrael, etc., ' Hear, O Israel, The Lord is our God, the Lord is one;' as if to turn every eye in scorn to one who could maintain that Jesus was the Son of God. It is the rallying-cry of the Jews ; it is a watchword worth a dozen of arguments to them." Dr. Bonar tells this in his book ; and it gives the true picture of the peculiar and supreme appreciation in which this watch- word is held among the Jews. It is possible, however, that there is a slight tincture of unfairness in this story thus told. The Shemah Yisrael is always very prominent in the synagogue worship; and it is possible that the missionary imagined more attention given to hmi than was really intended. f I must here notify the reader who is not familiar with the Hebrew that the word Adonai does not occur in this twenty-ninth psalm originally, but the original word is the tetragrammaton, for which Adonai is used as the substitute in the reading of the psalm. OF THE NAME A DONA I. n next dwell on the holy tetragrammaton, which fills t.\o places in this watchword. And, thirdly, I will find another argument in the word Elohim, which occurs once in the Watchword. Expecting to have other readers than yourself, I must, for their sake, write many things which you understand much better than I do ; and one of these things is that the three Hebrew words Adon, Adoni, and Adonai differ, as their respective renderings are. Lord, My Lord, and My Lords. Another is that the words shadim and Adonai are separated by the widest possible difference of meaning. Unitarianism would select the simple Adon, Lord or Master, as the best title for the Deity ; but Judah's choice passes by both Adon and Adoni, and falls on the plural Adonai, My Lords, with an intense preference. This last is the Divine name. When the mysterious Person ap- peared to Gideon as he was threshing wheat at the wine- press, and Gideon at first supposed him to be only a man, he addressed him by the word Adoni, My Lord ; but when he began to speak with Divine authority, causing his voice to be heard as the voice of God, and gave Gideon the assurance of successful conquest and deliver- ance to Israel because he had sent him, Gideon imme- diately changed the word of address to the Divine name Adonai ; and likewise at the close of that conversation this Divine name again occurs. Adonai appeared to be thus peculiarly stamped on both the consciousness and the conscience of the Hebrews in all ages as the more proper word to be used in a direct address to the great Creator. The Bible first brings this word to light, as a Divine name, in the prayers of Abraham. It is found just seven times in the prayers of this patriarch, and he used it only in prayer. It occurs more than one hundred and fifty times in the Bible : the Masorites made a mistake in Urn- 12 THE PLURALITY iting it to one hundred and thirty-four or five times. It is remarkably frequent in the psahns; and it holds its place in the writings of the latest prophets. The word appears first in the fifteenth chapter of Gen- esis, and here it fills two places. "Abram said, Lord God, what wilt thou give me, seeing I go childless?" "And he said. Lord God, whereby shall I know that I shall inherit it?" Or, to restore some of the original words to their places, Abram said, ^^ Adotiai, Jehovah, what wilt thou give me?" — '^Adotiai, Jehovah, whereby shall I know that I shall inherit it?" This chapter is the record of the original covenant with Abraham, and the name ^^/cWf?/ first appears here, and occupies two stations, as if from them presiding over the covenant. Abraham was directed to procure different animals, and cut them in halves and leave them lying each half opposite to the other; and the Lord was to establish the covenant by passing between the pieces. The animals could not be restored to life except by the adhesion of the separated halves, and so the covenant brought the Lord and Abra- ham into a close vital union in one purpose. But how did the Lord manifest his presence in that covenant of the carved pieces ? He was there the One and the Three. The three were — first the great darkness falling upon Abra- ham in unspeakable horrors, secondly the smoking fur- nace which was the fire from God that accepted the sacri- fices, and thirdly the burning lamp in the midst. That covenant may be called the rudiments of the whole Jewish religion. Li later and less dark ages, God was still dwelling in the thick darkness ; and his fire was on the smoking altar, accepting the same beasts and birds as sacrifices which Abraham had been directed to bring; and the burning lamp appeared again in the seven lamps of the candlestick, clos to the golden altar. The glory OF THE NAME ADONAI. 13 of God is the dense darkness to the ungodly, or especially to their guilty conscience ; and it is the fire which accepts the bleeding victim at the altar as an atonement and satisfaction for the penitent \ and it is the burning lamp which sends Divine knowledge, peace, comfort, and joy to the pilgrims on a dark road. The great darkness may stand for the incomprehensibility of God, and his eternity, his justice, his determination not to clear the guilty ; and the burning lamp may be the illuminator, the light of his Spirit. The other point already mentioned, which became known to you in the lessons of your childhood, is that shadim is a word with no mark of holiness on it, while Adonai is a holy name. Shadim means demons. The song of Moses says, " They sacrificed unto devils, not to God" (Deut. xxxii. 17); they sacrificed unto shadim. Though having this horrible meaning, it is very closely allied to the Divine x^z.\x\& Shaddai, which mea-W?, Aimighfy ; it has the form of the plural of this holy word. Shaddai contains the idea of unity, and is always of the singular number; and if it had been received into Israel's great watchword as the substitute, instead of the word that was received, unitarianism as opposed to trinitarianism would have been expressed with transcendently greater clearness. Now, my dear friend, if it has become a firm impression on your mind that it is Shaddai which has become the substituted word in this great text, and not Adonai, and that Trinitarians are trying to force it into a plurality, and the result of their work would be to change Shaddai into shadim, and make the verse read. Hear, O Israel, the demons our God are demons a unity, then no wonder if you exclaim that this is sacrilege the most horrible, blasphemy the most impious ! No wonder that you pro- test that the idpls and devils which the heathen worshiped 2 14 THE PLURALITY shall never be introduced into this text ; and you are fully justified before the face of high heaven in exclaiming that these are the false deities of Olympus, and that Jupiter, Minerva, and Pluto cannot be too intensely detested in such a connection ! On the other hand, it appears to me that a fair interpre- tation requires the admission that Shaddai and Adonai are not alike, and that the latter is stamped with a real plurality as it is found in the prayers of Abraham. How can it be consistently interpreted otherwise, in the third place where it occurs in the Bible, namely, in the first verses of the eighteenth chapter of Genesis ? The Lord appeared to Abraham in the plains of Mamre at noon ; he lifted up his eyes and saw three men ; he ran to meet them, bowed himself, and said to them, Adonai, or My Lords. He used this word for the three, and so it stood for a holy triad. It could not be a plural of majesty: it was an actual plural. And after this, in company with them on the way to Sodom, he used this word four times in his intercession for Sodom. One of the most solemn prayers of all his life was the prayer of that afternoon. In the evening Lot addressed the two angels with the same word, but, as thus used by Lot, the word, by uni- versal consent, is taken in its ordinary or secular sense, which is indicated by a slight difference in the Masoretic pointing. The next morning. Lot, in his flight from Sodom, said to them, "Oh, not so, Adonai f and he continued in a prayer for mercy ; and here it is stamjied as the Divine name used by Lot. Seven times the word is given as having been used by Abraham and Lot between the noon of one day and the sunrising of the next; it is clearly of the plural number, both as the utterance of Abraham and as the utterance of Lot ; it is plural both in its secular sense and as a Divine name; it meant a plu- OF THE NAME ADONAI. 15 rality and a triad as Abraham used it at noon, and it was repeated four times that same afternoon, in. all probability with its meaning unchanged, as the same conversation was continued, and Abraham himself uttered it the five times, and the same persons were addressed. Aben Ezra has dared to say that it may not have been the Adonai, the Divine name, either when Abraham first addressed the three strangers, or when Lot in the morn- ing called out Adonai, and prayed for mercy; but the most pious and learned rabbis were amazed at his saying so, and replied that it has the peculiar Masoretic vowels of the Divine name; that Onkelos took it in both these places for the Divine name, as he has translated it by the tetragrammaton itself; and the Talmud decides the same way; and the unvarying rule for the scribes of the law in all ages has been that they must write it as the Divine name in both these places. The Talmud is quoted (Shevu'oth, leaf 35), that in all places the Adonai wXX^x^t^S. by Abraham is the holy name. Jonathan ben Uzziel, whose Targum is about as ancient as the New Testament, took the unwarrantable liberty to set the singular number in his translation, in the place of the plural, in the original text. He has the pronoun him in the place of them ; he reads that Lot prayed to him for mercy, where the original text is that Lot said unto THEM, "Oh, not so, Adonai r^ Possibly this is one of the earliest instances of a rigid Unitarian tampering dishonestly with the words of the Bible. Jonathan pro- bably felt that it must not be permitted to appear as if Lot, praying to God for salvation, was praying to ///.r, ?nasters, and therefore must have been taken, not as the holy divine name, but as the common secu- lar mode of address. — Glad to know that the Septuagint perfectly agrees, in these seven points, with the view which has just been presented. LETTER II. Dear Friend : — I now leave the substituted name, and approach the great name which fills two places in the watchword of Israel, as this text has come down to us from the pen of Moses. This is the ineffable name, the four-lettered name, the tetragrammaton, ihtyodhevavhe, the most holy name in all the Bible, the most holy name that has ever been given to men to be seen inscribed in a book. It is the proper name for the Eternal One, and stands for his essence. Other names are epithets or derivatives from some of his attributes or some of his works, as, for in- stance, El, which is expressive of omnipotence, Adonai, which expresses supreme control. Creator, Redeemer, the God of Abraham, the Dweller between the Cherubim; but this is the essential name, and belonged as completely to God before there was one revolving world or one beam of light as it belongs now. Its majestic form is immu- table ; it cannot ever be changed into the form of the plural number, and it never holds a place, like the name Elohim, among the idols of the heathen : it is never joined with such an adjective as false, to indicate a hea- then deity. Beiiold it as it stands in the original text : Hear, O Israel : Jehovah our God is one Jehovah ; or, as some prefer to translate the verse : Hear, O Israel : Jeho- vah is our God, Jehovah is one. The argument connected with this name takes the form of three divisions, as follows : 19 20 THE TRINITARIAN CHARACTER 1. Joshua, the servant and disciple of Moses, could not give this name a plural form, but he appended a phrase to it which is strangely and intensely of the plural num- ber, as its just definition and equivalent. This is found in Josh. xxiv. 19:* "And Joshua said unto the people. Ye cannot serve Jehovah : for he is a holy God." Here the phrase holy God appears to be of the singular num- ber in the English translation ; but the original He- brew has both the noun God in the plural number, and the adjective holy, agreeing with it, in the plural number, which is remarkable here, because in nearly all instances in the Bible the term God, or Elohini, though strictly itself of the plural number, has both the adjectives and the verbs agreeing with it in the singular number. The tetragrammaton stands here as being defined the Gods, the holy ones, the holy persons. 2. An abstract Trinity lies in the tetragrammaton. John, the Divine, unfolds its true meaning when he pro- nounces the blessing of grace and peace "from him which is, and wHich was, and which is to come." These three times visibly hold their places in the word. It unites the words yehyeh, which means he will be, and hoveh, which means he is now, and hayah, which means he was, and holds the three words in its adorable unity. These are abstractions which make the impress of the in- finite on our minds. First, here is the great He-will-be, the eternity future. No intellect can imagine its termi- nation, and no arithmetic can give the figures of its mil- lions of ages. The journey of the immortal soul beyond the grave lies through it ; and as we try to count its vast ages, imagination cannot reach any moment to which our A * 't J' VI I* T : V ': - ! ■■ > T V "^ \ I OF THE TETRAGRAMMATON. 21 immortality will not in due time bring us ; and beyond that most distant moment that imagination and arithme- tic can reach, there still lies the same future eternity with- out diminution. The eternity past, that lies in another part of this holy name, has equal majesty ; it is equally beyond the comprehension of all created intellects. There is this difference, that we are always traveling away from it, while we are always traveling into the bosom of the other : we identify no point in one of these which our undying personality will not reach ; but the past eternity is gone, to us, and we cannot ever again touch one of its points. The present moment has its little place, between these two unbounded oceans of time. It is like a most slender ribbon drawn across the infinite ocean, or a blazing thread, in which all the created universe has its life, and this thread is never at rest, it is always m.oving on the surface and measuring off the mighty waves of the future into the past. No object is more limited, no shadow is more transient, and no light more quickly dies ; but, withal, it has in its little self all the value of the past eternity and all the promise of the future eternity. All the past is per- petuated and represented in it, and all the future will be unrolling from it. The vastness of eternity had to pro- duce a present moment, a present tense, which comes and goes with the twinkling of an eye, or no created being could ever have come into existence ; and if it should once cease, ^11 men and angels and all worlds would in- stantly be lost in the ocean of eternal time. This blazing moving thread that separates the two oceans would al- most bear to be personified, and the words might be put in its mouth, "No man hath seen God at any time; the only-begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him;" or, in less holy words, No man 2 2 THE TRINITARIAN CHARACTER hath explored the past eternity; but I, the present mo- ment, the occupant of its bosom, reveal it and possess all its worth. Or we may almost give to the present moment the words of Jesus when one disciple asked him to show them the Father, aad he answered, "He that hath seen me hath seen the Father : believest thou not that I am in the Father, and the Father in me?" So the present moment may claim that it reveals all the past, and that it was in all the past eternity, and all that eternity is now in it. To know fully the present moment is to know all the infinite past and foresee all the infinite future. The three tenses in their essential relations give us something very similar to the image of a Divine Trinity. The three times are one : and now can this august unity be illustrated? Suppose eternity, in its complete import, to take the form of an infinite circle, and that the present tense is a single blazing point moving along on that circle and never turning back or permitting itself to stop for rest : all men and angels, all created worlds, are confined to this one blazing point; they live and move and have their whole actual being in it ; they have traveled forward from the past in it, and they never can get into the future any faster than it will carry them. Thus traveling on in it as the blazing chariot of the universe, they look for- ward along the circle and appear to have a whole eternity before them, and they look back along the circle and it appears as if the whole infinite circle lies in their rear. But the place of the Creator himself is not in that chariot, as their place is; and all his time is not a single moment, as their time is. There is no past eternity to him, and no future eternity; there is no old time to him, and no new time, as these things appear to them in their unend- ing ride along the circle. He occupies the centre of the circle ; and this is the explanation how he inhabits eter- OF THE TETRAGRAMMATON. 23 nity ; and, being thus in the centre, all points of the circle are equally near to his eye and equally within the reach of his hand ; and the year of the world five billion five million six hundred and thirty is the same thing to his eye and hand as the year of the world which I might have put at the head of this letter according to your chronology. 3. A personal Trinity lies in the tetragrammaton. A living Trinity is in it, — not only the Trinity of abstrac- tions, but the Trinity of Divine and eternal life. It spontaneously expands into the form of three personal living names, and these three are equally holy, equally incomprehensible, equally Divine, equally impossible to be transferred so that any one may take the place of any other, and equally impossible ever to be assumed by even the most glorious angel that ever worships before the throne. They are three in one : they are clearly sepa- rated, yet they unite in the one great name. The begin- ning of the tetragrammaton brings out the separate name, I-will-be-that-I-will-be. " Moses said unto God, Behold, when I come unto the children of Israel, and shall say unto them. The God of your fathers hath sent me unto you ; and they shall say to me. What is his name ? what shall I say unto them ? And God said unto Moses, I-will- be-that-I-will-be : and he said. Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I-will-be hath sent me unto you." (Ex. iii. 13, 14.) This is a voice coming from the depths of the infinite future and proclaiming that God dwells there, and that his living name in the first person, as grammarians say, or the person of the speaker, fills that unending duration. Only God can speak from the bosom of the infinite future. Men and angels and moving worlds never can send forth their voice from any other time than the present moment ; the only time that they can 24 THE TRINITARIAN CHARACTER call their own is the present : all their future lies in the Omnipotent Hand, and they have no sure hope in the future, except as they can stand on some Divine promise. Let them all fall down in the adoring worship of him who has the name I-will-be-that-I-will-he for himself alone, and to whom all the future is perfectly the same as the present moment. The close of the tetragrammaton furnishes the other Divine name, Jah ; and it stands for the past eternity just as the first name stands for the coming eternity. The hayah at the close is modified into the personal name Jah ; the strength of the Deity "is concentrated in this great name. The past cannot be changed : what is completely past must remain eternally what it already is : so the immutability of God is enshrined in the name Jah. It is radiant with the truth that Divine law must be sustained, and that wickedness must meet its due punish- ment. When the Lord makes his oath against Amalek, he raises his hand to heaven,* or rather, as it is in the seventeenth chapter of Exodus, with the hand laid on the throne of Jah he swears to perpetuate the war against Amalek through all generations. Thus the hand laid on the throne of Jah is the sign of the most fearful oath that is ever made in heaven. All the strength of the infinite past must be exhausted before this oath can fail to be ful- filled. The prophet Isaiah has the word Jah in two places, and in both it stands in the closest connection with the full tetragrammaton : the first is a quotation from the verse in the song of Moses at the Red Sea, "My strength and my song is Jah," which the prophet lengthens by adding the tetragrammaton to the Jah, "My strength and song is Jah Jehovah" (Isa. xii. 2); the *■ Deut. xxxii. 40. OF THE TETRAGRAMMATON. 25 other brings forth the idea of strength and immutability with great emphasis: "Trust in the Lord forever, be- cause in Jah Jehovah is the rock of ages" (Isa. xxvi. 4). Creation naturally brings forward the word Jah, as being connected with it, and having the meaning of God before all, as is illustrated by the verse (Ps. cii. 18), " the people created shall praise Jah." The Targum dwells on the expression in Solomon's Song, "the flame of Jah," that this flame is hell, the world which the Lord created on the second of the six days of creation, to be the abode of the punishment of fire for those who go after strange gods. A singular saying was among the rabbis, that God created the worlds in the two letters of the word Jah. The psalmist says, " Sing unto God, sing praises to his name : extol him that rideth upon the heavens by his name JAH." Ps. Ixviii. 4. With the I-will-be-that-I-will-be thus blazing at the opening of the tetragrammaton, and the Jah blazing at its close, the former the Divine name for the future eter- nity and the latter the Divine name for the past eternity, it appears as if the mighty present ought also to have its separate Divine name; and we do find a second tetra- grammaton which appears to be precisely this separate name, and to be properly designated as the central or interjacent ineffable name. Remember how the Scripture reads : "And God spake to Moses, and said to him, I am Jehovah. And I appeared to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob by El Shaddai [God Almighty], and by my name Jehovah was I not known to them." (Ex. vi. 2, 3.) But how can this be brought into harmony with the facts that God did say to Abraham that he was Jehovah who had brought him out from Ur of the Chaldees, and that Abra- ham once gave a name to a mountain and incorporated the tetragrammaton into this name? Aben Ezra doubtless B 3 26 THE TRINITARIAN CHARACTER declares what is the truth, that the tetragrammaton was certainly known to all these patriarchs. The true inter- pretation must therefore be that it assumed a new mean- ing in the time of Moses, which the patriarchs had never been taught to give it. They viewed it as the sublime term for the unity of God, and as being properly inter- preted, — He-who-will-be, He-who-is-now, and He-who- was ; but they may have looked no further ; they may never have perceived the personal Trinity in it. The name I-will-be-that-I-will-be was first communicated to Moses, and the name Jah is never found before the song of Moses at the Red Sea; and the tetragrammaton, as limited by the first of these on one side, the side of the future eternity, and by the second on the other side, the side of the past eternity, may have been revealed first to Moses and may never have been known to the patriarchs. When the Lord revealed himself to Moses in the fissure of the rock after the offense in the worship of the golden calf, and in connection with the writing of the second tables of the law, he proclaimed a tetragrammaton the first and a tetragrammaton the second: — "The Lord passed by before him, and proclaimed : Jehovah, Jehovah, El, merciful and gracious, long-suffering, and abundant in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands." (Ex. xxxiv. 6, 7.) If it be argued that the two words at the head of this list, being the same, must be interpreted as a mere repetition, our answer is that the tradition of the rabbis contradicts this and requires that they have different meanings. The rabbinic tradition finds thirteen names for God in tliis list : Jehovah is the first, Jehovah is the second, El the third. Merciful the fourth, Gracious the fifth, and so on, until the last is the thirteenth ; and this proves clearly that a real difference was accepted OF THE TETRAGRAMMATON. 27 between the first tetragrammaton and the second, other- wise the two ought to have been counted as only one. If you promise to give five designations of George Wash- ington, and count them, George Washington the first, George Washington the second. First in war the third. First in peace the fourth, and First in the hearts of his countrymen the fifth, it is evident that' you give George Washington two meanings, because if you do not your designations really number only four. The preferable interpretation is to take the first tetragrammaton as the patriarchal, and the second as the new one revealed to Moses which had not been made known to the patri- archs. The first then includes the second, and the second holds its marked place in the present tense between the I-will-be-that-I-will-be of the future and the Jah of the past. This second tetragrammaton comes prominently for- ward in Hosea i. 7, where Jehovah promises, "I will have mercy upon the house of Judah, and I will save them by Jehovah their God, and will not save them by bow, nor by sword, nor by battle, by horses, nor by horsemen." Here the Lord promises salvation, and it will come by the second Lord as the instrument. Before I bring this argument into the New Testament, I must adduce three other texts from the Hebrew Bible, in which the Messiah is found by the majority of devout commentators. In the first text he has the \\\\q Adon ; in the second, the title jfchovah ; and in the third his name is the fellow of Jehovah of Sabaoth. The first text is Mai. iii. i which reads: "Behold I will send my mes- senger, and he shall prepare the way before me : and the Lord {Adofi) whom ye seek shall suddenly come to his temple, even the angel of the covenant whom ye delight in: behold he shall come, saith the Lord of Sabaoth." 28 THE TRINITARIAN CHARACTER The second text is Isa. xl. 3: "The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord (Jehovah), make straight in the desert a high way for our God." The third text isZech. xiii. 7 : "Awake, O sword, against my shepherd, and against the man that is my fel- low, saith Jehovah of Sabaoth : smite the shepherd, and the sheep shall be scattered ; and I will turn mine hand upon the little ones." Wonderful language is this, which places this shepherd before us, as x\\q fellow of Jehovah Qf Sabaoth ! But what ! if this phrase, Jehovah of Sa- baoth, proves that the word Jehovah has passed from a proper noun to a common noun ! This very point will face us before the present Letter' closes. And just here the question begins to look us in the face, whether there is any possibility that the name Jehovah can be found as a common noun among the prophets, and can stand only for One person, with no fellow of the One standing by his side? The word here translated fellow, vs> gnamith, and it never means an opponent or adversary, as is clear from the only other places where it occurs in the Bible : these are eleven, and are confined to the book of Leviti- cus. They are Lev. vi. 2 where it occurs twice, and Lev. xxv. 14 where it also is found twice ; and in each of these four places it is translated by the word neighbor ; with Lev. xix. II, 15, 17; xviii. 20; xxiv. 19; xxv. 15, 17. [The argument from Solomon's Song will appear in another Letter,*] * Solomon's Song vii. 5 : " the King is held in the galleries." Aben Ezra elucidates this in his Commentary, thus: xin 'D^tama liDN ^Sd nSij nStfiT' n3intt> ara 13 ijijimp i|i>nj?n itt'No "\ids Nmr mti'cn " this King is the Messiah, who is bound in accordance with what our ancestors have delivered to us, that on the day when Jerusalem was destroyed he was born." The Jews of the present day, who have no faith in the promised Messiah, have wandered to a great distance from the views which their fathers held. OF THE tetragrammaton: 29 In the Septuagint and the New Testament, the original tetragrammaton is uniformly translated by the word Kurios, which is, in the English Bible, Lord. This word Kurios is often applied to Jesus Christ, as in the following in- stances : Matt. vii. 22, " Many will say to me in that day. Lord, Lord!" John xiii. 13, "Ye call me Master and Lord: and ye say well; for so I am;" Luke xvii. 5, "And the apostles said unto the Lord, Licrease our faith;" Luke xxiii. 42, "And he said unto Jesus, Lord, remember me when thou comest into thy kingdom;" John XX. 28, "And Thomas answered and said unto him, My Lord and my God;" Acts x. 36, "The word which God sent unto the children of Israel, preaching peace by Jesus Christ (he is Lord of all);" 2 Peter iii. 18, "But grow in grace, and in the knowledge of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ;" Rev. xix. 15, 16, "He treadeth the winepress of the fierceness and wrath of Almighty God ; and he hath on his vesture and on his thigh a name written, King of kings and Lord of Lords." And when it is remembered that this word Kurios in its holy meaning among the Jews originated from the tetragrammaton, there cannot be any doubt that in all these passages it is really the tetragrammaton translated, and not properly the ancient patriarchal one, but rather the second and central tetragrammaton which was made known to Moses, having its abode in the ])resent tense,'and limited on one side by the name I-will- be-that-I-will-be, and on the other by the name Jah. This being admitted, it needs no argument that the Jah is the same as the eternal Father, or God before all. The remaining name, I-will-be-that-I-will-be, admits of a strict application to the Holy Ghost, or the Spirit of God. The Egyptians attributed the perfect knowledge of all the future to the Spirit of God, as is proved by the -* o 3° THE TRINITARIAN CHARACTER exclamation of Pharaoh when Joseph had just revealed to him the seven coming years of plenty to be succeeded by as many years of famine : he said to his servants, "Can we find such a one as this is, a man in whom the Spirit of God is?" and, assuredly, the perfect knowledge of the future belongs in the strictest propriety to him whose essential name is I-will-be-that-I-will-be. The Spirit of God anoints a messenger to preach good tidings to the meek, to bind up the broken-hearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound ; and the best thing that Moses could go and say to his oppressed brethren was that this Spirit, as the eternal I-will-be, had sent him ; and the seal of this Spirit was all that his commission needed. The Spirit of God in the beginning moved cyi the face of the waters ; and there was a moral chaos among the Hebrews in Egypt over which no influence could be effectual ex- cept the influence of the same Spirit. " The Angel of his presence saved them," says Isaiah; "but they re- belled, and vexed his Holy Si)irit." Isa. Ixiii. 9, 10. The Jewish commentators of the most enlightened school concede that the tetragrammaton is in some places a Dx>'n oc, and in other places a ixn ds:', that is, both a proper name and an appellative, both a proper noun and an adjective noun or a derivative from some event, both a designation of essence and a designation of a quality or agency.* Aben Ezra held that it was * Ki'fHog and Ki'pLog aa(iaud (Lord and Lord of Sabaoth), both of them common nouns or appellatives, are used throughout the Septuagint and the New Testament (Rom. ix. 29, James v. 4) to translate nin> and niN3S nin^ (Jehovah and Jehovah of hosts) ; and as this appears to indi- cate that both these Hebrew terms were accepted in the light of appella- tives long before Christianity was known in the world, it may be useful to consult carefully one of the highest authorities on this subject, which is OF THE TETRAGKAMMETON. 31 known to the patriarchs as a proper noun, a particular name, but Moses was the first to know it as an appel- Aben Ezra, who gives the following as a part of his comment on the third chapter of Exodus : Qxp npD lyniu''-?! iNiip"? p'dSi niNS ocicn Kin Dxyn db' 13 yi ni-^nn ob' ^d inxn iNnn db'D Dsyn Da* Si3> m^T i-j?2-\n31 xnpjn 7r-innN3 Qonn jyoS -\2]> Sjjia p*? Djn dk •'JO Djn ido Svbod nrjj iJi'N i"inj> IX 13J? i:dd itr nS onn^N iD3 Dx;;n d::' p nSi ttij; "jyio Diy >3 pns'N nSi >npns> cdni nS pnxi id3 '?j;i3D lUJi:' nxi; Dty b'ib' n:Si fiDan idnhi -inhh ob* S3n nannc on nanni npno ujin dxj? NDmax qot Su idk'' nS Dspn Diy Nina' om^xn rOi':' pn> Qi'jNns'i iDN'' NcS nirjx ij'.i' DiS' nin p DN Dsyn ■oif ^yrw Snt^^d nanni pDn ob» retina' H^ns''' Sk nnx >a>^ Dni'n''!f3 njj idni pn '» L L >3 iNnn 02' nNi3< iu'xd nynn xn^ nxno n^ni x? axjrn oa' >r>7a'n 1CN nSna njj?a pxi pHS^n amaxn nnxi xS njni oonn ncN' osn p Nin Dixni 13 nSnpja' nD3nS nxn ais' pi asyn oir urx '>3 nSnpn i3ini Dmn iisrs n!:'jDn nSci pon otf xin 13 niD h cm nxn Dts* NiS 33S Q3n 1D3 iNtnn □a' idd'' •ia'X3 ncoi x'? oxyn oa* ■>r3"\n oa'n CDJ ri>nx nSn n33 njm icsy3 nnij? Dspn ■>3 inn pnxi idx'' i3ixim nix3x fii uxxD njm osj?n niDa? nnija* o rvnix nn n33jn pn^ xS nti iSa* X3X3 nix xin ix xin ospn aa* nix3X '3 idiS a''3T □en ajj IX a^Sx ay ax ■'S 'ijxxnn xS n3'7i nix3sn \nSx njn 13 1-n3 Ntin 13 mxax C3\"iSx 01 -iij'>j;3 na'P'' Sxi a^'jx f" lasjn Sy nDiy S3n 131 n3'7 naiy ny pia' aa'na' •ii3y3i x>3jn miy nxi3jni cyoni my na'D aSiy in'' •ii3!'ii tit "^y nxn id3 aa'n n? xin aya p fi'' .—1331 oa'npn c>3>-c'7cn icy a^pJT ain^x cii p "ry ninycn xina' niaysa' nnixn pxjn nai Sx yiDa'S naxn "^xi BTa'n mx3x an nixas X3X •?3i nxnn x?n inix3s nx Tixsini p mxn xiani p xnpj Sxna" iinM a^ai pa's Sy xin 13 aa'n ixn a>nSx njni rh-i a>iDiy a'>Da'n piSdi Sxia-i ■>n'7x a^nSx nniS icD'a' myi aica' nau niSx xSn 103 T11X3 ina* nini ina- Sips aoi bid Sipa na' n33i q^pn "^x The rabbi here separates a shem ha'etsem and j/ii'/w hatoar, or a proper noun and appellative, by four marks. First, a proper noun cannot be made a verb with the distinctions of past and future time, as a common noun often is. We cannot say to a friend, Study carefully the character of Abraham and you yourself will soon be Abrahaviivg. Proper nouns do not admit of such inflection. A proper noun may originate from a verb, as the name Isaac, which is literally he will laugh, but it cannot bring with it any of the verb's inflections. Secondly, an appellative ad- mits of the plural ; a proper name does not, because it is unchangeably one. If a name has originated with one person, and it now passes to his children or descendants, it has become an appellative. Thirdly, a proper 32 THE TRINITARIAN CHARACTER lative. This is a remarkable concession, as it appears at first sight to make the rabbinic theology flash with a cer- noun never needs the definite article to point it out. It cannot be said; in Hebrew, The Abnikam. The phrase "The preacher," in the book of Ecclesiastes, is not an exception, because, though applied to only one person, it is properly an appellative. Adam is made a shem ioar, an ap- pellative, as is proved by the use of the article, — The Adam, which means one of the race. Fourthly, a proper noun cannot be put in the construct state. The phrase is not admissible, the Isaac of a generation, if the word means only the son of Abraham. A proper noun stands limited and defined by itself, and does not need to stand in the construct state with a noun immediately after it to limit it. The Divine names T^>r\n I-ivill-be and the tetragrammaton are two proper nouns. In view of the phrase jfehovah of hosts, many have felt compelled to say that Sabaoth, hosts, itself is a proper Divine name in apposition with the tetragram- maton, or that it was a sign in his host ; but this is not to be admitted, because there is Elohe Sabaoth, clearly proving that the translation must be God of hosts, and we never find it except with the tetragrammaton or Elohim. It should not be a difficulty that Elohim in the absolute state is once found immediately followed by Sabaoth, because the same anomaly is found in the phrase " the prophecy of Oded the prophet i' if the original is examined (2 Chron. xv. 8). And inasmuch as the Lord inhabits eternity, and exists by himself, and all things exist in him, the tetragrammaton is, accordingly, in some instances like an appellative after the model of "And he remembered the days of old, Moses, his people;" and its meaning is that he is the Maamid, the Establisher of beings, the Eternizer of hosts ; and so with Jehovah Elohim are associated the holy angels, and Jehovah of hosts refers to the hosts of heaven. Give no weight to the words of Gaon assuming that the host of Israel is meant, and depending on the verse, "And I will bring forth my hosts, my people, the children of Is- rael" (Ex. vii. 4) ; but rather remember the verse, " All the host of heaven standing by him on his right hand and on his left." (i Kings xxii. 19.) Mark also that Elohim (God) is an appellative as it occurs in both num- bers, singular and plural. Aben Ezra might have added as another evidence that Elohim is an appellative, that the definite article is in some places prefixed to it. On the other hand, the tetragrammaton, I suppose, never takes the article, and it never can be literally of the plural number. But the decisive proof that in some instances it is a shem toar, an appellative, is the phrase jfehovah of hosts, or its construct state in conjunction with the word hosts. These are proved by Aben Ezra to be the celestial, intelli- OF THE TETRAGRAMMATON. zz tain trinitarian hue. There are two theories to explain this concession. I. One theory is that the shem ha' etsem, the proper name, was the original, and in a later age it came to be also an appellative. It was first the proper exclusive name for the Almighty, designating his eternal essence, and then the later Scriptures made it a common noun. gent, worshiping hosts. It is an ancient theory, advocated by many rabbis, that the naked word Sabaoth is one of the Divine names. Possibly the object was to escape from the admission that the tetragrammaton is in any instance an appellative. Our rabbi shows how impartial criticism compels to the admission that it is both a proper name and an appellative. See also Aben Ezra on the sixth chapter of Exodus. This long note will be excused on account of the great importance of this one point. And, to illustrate its importance, read the first verse of the Epistle of James: — " James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ, to the twelve tribes which are scattered abroad, greeting." Here Jesus Christ is the Lord or Kurios, and the preceding word God might have had the word Lord also connected with it, which proves that Kurios as a Divine name in the New Testament is an appellative ; but what is the result if the original tetragrammaton, the most holy and ineffable name, is itself found to have the same appellative character? When it once proves itself an appellative, like the term Kurios in the verse above, it fatally betrays the cause of unitarianism, passes into the ranks of Trinitarians, and becomes one of the mighty guns in that camp. At least so much is settled beyond dispute, that if the tetragrammaton was once the proper name — nomen proprivm — for God, and if it afterwards be- came changed into an appellative or common noun, still retaining all the holiness and strength of its first import, and abounds as an appellative, in the phrase jfihovah of hosts, through the later Scriptures, this change was a mighty step towards the doctrine of the New Testament, where the Divine name. Lord, is a real appellative, and the term Lord of hosts is shared both by the Lord of hosts who calls the sword to awake, and the man, his fellow, the shepherd, the Messiah, whom this sword must smite. If the supreme object was to teach the unitarian view that the Deity is only one person, when the tetragrammaton was once known as his proper essential name it should have been left there, and should never have been changed into an appellative ; because when any proper name is changed into an appellative the impression is naturally and logically made that more than one are now known as sharers in tlie name. B* 34 THE TRINITARIAN CHARACTER Adam furnishes a good illustration. It was first the proper name of one man; but afterwards many came under this name, and the offerer at the Jewish altar is mentioned in the law as an Adam. If the holy name Jehovah was ever thus expanded so as to embrace two ot more persons, it is important to remember that the per- sons must have been eternal and Divine, because this name never could receive any meaning carrying it out- side of the eternal circle of Deity. It was not like the appellation Elohim (God), which also stood for heathen deities. It was not like the sublime appellation Holy, — and it was his highest praise that his name was Holy, — because man was also called to be holy in conjunc- tion with God. It was not like the appellative Creator, because Jupiter might be called the Creator in Greek mythology. The tetragrammaton never could * become the appellative of any created being, and still less could it ever be transferred to any false god or any deity of imagination's creation. If it ever stood for two or more persons, these persons were persons within the eternal circle of the Godhead. Then how could the name Je- hovah pass from the proper and essential name of one person, so as to become a common name, and still main- tam the impossibility of any application to any other person than the original one ? Was a proper name ever known to become an appellative and still stand for only one person ? Has logic ever discovered one such fact ? The name Adam could not become an appellative until it began to stand for more human persons than the first man. Caesar was originally the proper name of one per- son, and it passed into an appellative when more than one were Caesars. Napoleon Bonaparte was first the proper name of one person ; but if we say that a certain personage is the Napoleon Bonaparte of his country, the OF THE TETRAGRAMMATON. 35 word is instantly made an appellative and loses its origi- nal restriction to only one person. This phrase, the Napoleon of his country, contains the word country as a limitation of the word Napoleon, or as indicating where this particular Napoleon is to be found; and so in the phrase Jehovah Sabaoth, Jehovah of hosts, the word Je- hovah is in the construct state, and the word hosts is joined to it to limit it ; but no proper name needs to be thus limited, because it is itself its own perfect limita- tion. If then this most holy m.mt Jehovah has passed, like other proper names, from a proper name to an ap- pellative, behold what inferences, adverse to unitarianism, appear to follow ! 2. The other theory is that the original tetragrammaton was the appellative, and the proper Divine name grew out of it in a later age. The perfect and most interesting illustration of this theory is furnished by the name Shaddai, or Almighty, as it is translated. This name Shaddai is classed by Aben Ezra among the Divine appel- latives, on the ground that it has the primary meaning of absolute sufficiency a.nd unlimited power ; but in all parts of the Bible it presents itself as having already grown from its primary meaning into the perfect state of a proper Divine name, and accordingly it fulfills the four laws which Aben Ezra lays down for proper nouns, and never presents one exception to them : first, it has no variations of form to separate past and future times ; secondly, it is never of the plural number, unless indeed the impure word shadim should occur as its plural, which is an imagination not to be cherished for a moment ; thirdly, it never has the article prefixed, — the word nari is never found ; and fourthly, it never appears in the construct state, and hence, while Jehovah Sabaoth occurs very often, Shaddai Sabaoth, or Shaddai of hosts, never 36 THE TRINITARIAN CHARACTER occurs once. This last point presents it in a clear light how Shaddai always stands as a proper name, while the tetragrammaton departs from it and takes the character of an appellative; and besides, as the phrase Jehovah Sabaoth first comes into existence near the time of David and abounds in the later Scriptures, while it is never found with either Moses or the patriarchs, there is here strong evidence against this second theory, and it appears as if the first theory must be the true one, that the tetragram- maton was originally the proper name, and its appellative character was its development in later ages. But on the hypothesis that the appellative existed originally, and the proper name grew out of it, — on the hypothesis that the tetragrammaton as a proper name is a derivative,* — the * This theory that the word jfehovah is a derivative of some event or circumstance appears to stand in diametrical opposition to the views of Maimonides in the More Nebuchim, part first, section sixty-one. I make a few quotations. antJJ dSo DnaD3 D''NXDjn nSj;n> T'niDB' Vo 'M'Ni Ncrn ni/v rNini nnN at:' kSn 13 oSpn pxir nn nn •m'^u'sn p j^inc ij"jp ^c-!iaDn aa' N{-\pj nrSi rnSyn'' iS nnrn o^' Nintr No-n vmctt' "isif. DJDN -nj nionnirn px mxiaD ns-iin rjjn'' idxj; Sj? mv 1DD i:S QniD3 NtXDi DiVipflD o>->uj QnvnS f\\r'ifi onm onjsjn JD ItJJ p QJ Win Ntcn VrNI NiiTI •Vf\> 13 HJIDDH otrntf ij; 1J-lN3a> nicp unx yixn ijnN C'-nh -lai rnmNn All the names of the Most High found in the books, all of them, are derivatives from actions; and this is not to be concealed, — with the exception of one name, and it is the yod he vav he, which is the proper name for the Most High, and hence it is called the shem meporash, meaning that it conveys a pure conception of the essence of the Most High without any mixture. But his other glorious names admit a participation, in their being derived from actions the like of which are found among us, just as we have already explained that Ado?iai, the substituted word for yod he vav he, has its origin in the idea of lordship, as is indicated in the text, "The man, the lord of the land, spake roughly with us" (Gen. xlii. 30). In the same sec- tion the verse Zech. xiv. 9 is cited : " In that day Jehovah will be one, and his name one;" and the explanation is appended: nna Nin idob* S^T •■^ijj Nini:> NcSi i^S DX5?n Sy .— nmn Nim noS nnN Dira in Nip^ ?3 OF THE TETRAGRAMMATON. 37 question arises, What might have been the prerogative or event or circumstance from which the name Jehovah originally grew, and afterwards ripened into the proper essential and exclusive name of the Father of all spirits? It can be supposed that the primary meaning was the Worker of miracles ; and that Jehovah of hosts means the Upholder of the celestial realm of angels in their glorious existence, after the creation, by a continual miracle. Then, if the theory is that amazing and Divine wonders first placed the holy name on the lips of those who wit- nixxDjn rmSiyon •"dS injin niDty qSo ana* nnx nii o^iyn -.rnn OB' iS nin^ nS Sya Sod d^'did inrn •'pj icxj? jnanco djdx -DSiirj Dtt' uSxx pxi MDsy SjJ nmn*? nnvD nnx du' Son rDijs dicj nuj ."\1DJ cniiJDn Dt:' Nin iu'n no-h V/-ni kh-h nrcr Nim ni kSn itjj ^nSa He desires to say that as he is one, so he will then be called by one name alone, and it will refer to his essence alone, and will not be a derivative. In the Pirke R. Eliezer, he says, " While the world was not yet created, there existed only the Holy Blessed be He, and his name." Remark well how he brings it out that these derivative names all came into existence after the creation of the world ; and this is the truth, because all depend on actions of God found in the world. But when you separate the pure, simple, absolute essence of God from every action, there is no deriva- tive name Left to him in any sense, but only the one particular name indi- cating his essence. And we have no name aside from derivatives except this one, and it \% yod he vav he, which is the absolute definite name. Further on, Maimonides explains how this absolute definite name came to be pronounced rarely even by the priests in the temple, and how the name of twelve letters came to be pronounced in the place of the tetra- grammaton. It was not so holy as the tetragrammaton, but was evidently more holy than the substitute Adonai which is now universally used. mm niPB' pijD px ,-nvnix mtrj; DinB* p Nin -iit'x p dj ott'n T\-\y pff /-[ r-ffha niNlinD ^^11D nnv p'^Jj; *?!?. The other holy name also came into use as a substitute for the tetragrammaton, the name containing forty-two letters. This had also a degree of holiness inferior to the four- lettered name. The rabbis often refer to these two great names, one of twelve letters, the other of forty-two, but very rarely is any attempt made to explain them. The knowledge of them was confined to the learned and pious ; and persons of light habits of thought were not instructed in them. 4 38 THE TRINITARIAN CHARACTER nessed them ; that all miracles of Divine grace and moral government properly originate in the tetragrammaton ; that Moses obtained a deeper knowledge of this name, and hence he performed the greatest wonders and had such power over nature as no one had had before him ; — and if it is a part of this theory that the miracles of the six days of creation are properly the wonders of Elohim (God), and hence the name Jehovah does not occur once in the first chapter of Genesis, but first comes into view in the second chapter and after the mention of God's resting on the seventh day, so that the miracles of Jeho- vah are really of a higher character than the work of the six days of creation, and rest on this work as the founda- tion ; — if it is also a part of this theory that the term Jehovah is never found in the whole book of Ecclesiastes because there is no reference to miracles in that book, but the works of Cod are there the operations of nature as established in the creation, without any addition and without any diminution, as if there is nothing new under the sun, but all makes one mighty stream moving by natural laws: it will not, I trust, be found very difficult in my next letter to prove that this whole theory may be used very advantageously to illustrate the precise meaning of the term Son of God as it appears in the beginning of the New Testament. The chief evidence that the tetragrammaton is an appel- lative in some places, as well as the proper essential Divine name in others, is found by these rabbis in the phrase Jehovah of hosts. These hosts may refer to the stars, but they are rather the celestial hosts of worshipers before the throne, — the higher and still higher orders of holy angels. A very wide difference separates the two terms Jehovah and Jehovah of hosts. The former is the essential name ; and whether he is found existing in our time, or existing OF THE TETRAGRAMMATON. 39 back in eternity, before the foundation of the world, before the first dawn of the morning star, before the first radiance of any world, he has the same perfect and un- changeable name Jehovah. This name is the same mighty light in the eternity before all worlds that it is among the worlds of time. On the contrary, the term Jehovah of hosts arises from a union of the Creator with his crea- tion. The hosts were first created before their Creator could be Jehovah of hosts. The term has the eternity of God for one-half of its support, and the high realm of created and celestial intellect for its other support. If the phrase should come into use, Willis Lord, the Lord of Wooster University, Ohio, here Lord would be in the first place a proper name, in the second place an appellative. The first is the proper name of a personal unity ; it has been his name through all life back to his infancy, and it will be his name till his last day on earth, and will continue to be his name as long as his memory remains among the living ; but the second Lord became his appellative only a short time ago, and long after his proper name had become illustrious in his church, and it may cease to be his appellative long before his death. And this may illustrate the difference between Jehovah and Jehovah of hosts, — how the former is the proper essential Divine name, while the latter must be accepted as an appellative, and first became joined to the essential name only as far back as yesterday morning, when the morning stars first began to sing together. It may also illustrate the trinitarian relation between the three terms Jah, Jehovah of hosts, and I-will-be-that-I-will-be. The first is God in the unlimited unchangeable past ; the second is God in the limited hastening present moment of angels and men ; the third is God in the unlimited future. The first means God in his essential and eternal 40 THE TRINITARIAN CHARACTER independence before he had performed one act of crea- tion ; the third means God holding the same independ- ence and essential glory in the future, even if all the celestial host should become like a lamp extinguished and laid away in darkness ; I will be that I will be, will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and will show mercy on whom I will show mercy ; but the second has its place between these two, very much as the present mo- ment has its place between two infinite oceans of time. And the venerable patriarchal name Jehovah contained the germ of the three names which first began to appear separated in the time of Moses.* Let Jehovah of hosts then be called one of time's names, while the other two are eternity's names ; and several other names are found affiliated with Jehovah of hosts, and belong to the same class. The God of Abra- ham is a term belonging to the same class, since there could not be the God of Abraham until Abraham was born. The Dweller between the Cherubim is another term of the same kind : it could not come into use until the mercy-seat had been furnished with the winged cher- ubim. Another term of the same kind is Jehovah-Tsid- kenu. The Lord our Righteousness, occurring in Jer. ■*" It needs, nevertheless, to be marked here that the proper noun Wil- lis Lord has not furnished a good illustration, since it is not the root which produced the common noun lord in our language; and indeed we see only a merely accidental connection between this proper and this common noun. Not such as this is the connection between Jehovah a proper noun and Jehovah the common noun, between this shcm ha'etsem and this shem toar, but these two stand in the most essential connection ; as, for example, if some one should be called the Moses Montefiore of New York, here Moses Montefiore would be made an appellative or common noun, having as its root the proper name of the distinguished English philanthropist. We leave it a question whether Jehovah the appellative was the root of the proper name or the derivative of it. But the essential and indissoluble relation between the two cannot be questioned. OF THE TETRAGRAMMATON. 41 xxiii. 6 as one of the names of the Messiah.* First, there must be a people appropriating the" righteousness of the Lord to themselves, and then God can have the name among them, Jehovah our Righteousness, but not sooner. If we pass on to the New Testament, we find there terms of this class very numerous. The Lord Jesus is one of them. This term in its specific sense was not heard before the time of Mary the mother. Jesus Christ is another term, referring to the anointing of the Holy Ghost, which can be traced to the very time when it originated. Remember that the name Jehovah has its origin in the infinite vastness'of eternity; and hence we draw a line between it and these other terms which origi- nated at particular points in time. Jehovah of hosts is never mentioned in all the writings of Moses. It is first heard close to the time of David. Almost the first sight of the term that we have is in i Sam. iv. 4: "And the people sent to Shiloh, and brought from thence the ark of the covenant of Jehovah of hosts, the Dweller of the Cherubim." In a foregoing chapter it is recorded that the parents of Samuel brought their sacrifices regularly to Jehovah of hosts in Shiloh. The term had come into general use in the time of David. The magnificent song for the dedication of the temple contains it. "Jehovah of hosts, he is the King of glory:" this is the verse closing that song. The term is found in more than sixty places in Isaiah. It has not yet * Buxtorf, in his Lexicon Hebraicum et Chaldaicum, under the tetra- grammatic name, presents the following extract from the Jewish book, 'Ikkarim, Orat. ii. cap. 28 : invnS upnx nin' n-'Ji'cn Df ainon ^n|1^1 DJrn UV1 inNipi fa Spi it Si? arnn pTin j>t:'jtt' Sn ijixgn — that is. The Scripture calls the name of the Messiah The Lord our Righteousness, because he is the Mediator of God, and we will obtain righteousness from God at his hand, wherefore he is called by the name of the telragram- maton. /I* 42 THE TRINITARIAN CHARACTER reached its growth ; it obtained a much larger growth in a later age. It overshadows the later books much more generally than it does Isaiah. The Babylonish captivity brought it into a wonderfully popular use. It is found scattered through Jeremiah in seventy-four places. It grew into still more common use after the captivity. Zechariah has it among the first words of his book, and uses it in a remarkable way to expand a single verse ; it is the third verse of the first chapter: "Therefore say thou unto them, Thus saith Jehovah of hosts : Turn ye unto me, saith Jehovah of hosts, and I will turn unto you, saith Jehovah of hosts." Zechariah has this term in fifty-three places. Haggai has it in thirteen places. Malachi has it in twenty-four places. Haggai has a larger use of the term to a hundred verses than Zecha- riah has ; and Malachi, the last prophet, gives us the term Jehovah of hosts more often in the same number of verses than even Haggai does. It blooms in its greatest beauty and strength with the last prophets. It has no such appearance as a tree that has finished its growth and is ready to wither. It has the appearance, in these last prophets, of lights thickly set along the shore at even- tide, and this is the shore of the Hebrew inspired canon. It is as the sound of many voices heard along the shore, and all uttering a cheerful and hopeful good-night. The night passes round, and the shore of the New Testament becomes visible on the other side of the river, and there the similar terms. Lord Jesus and Jesus Christ, are the morning lights scattered about as thickly as the term Jehovah of hosts on this shore ; and they are like many voices on a new shore, or rising from a new dispensation, and saying, Hail to the morning ! and their good-morn- ing is in blessed harmony with the good-night that has sounded along this shore. OF THE TETRAGRAMMATON. 43 These Divine complex names that join the Lord with his creation, and with events in time, certainly cluster in the greatest number and display their most brilliant and thickest galaxy over that narrow space where the last Hebrew prophets and the writers of the New Testament stand closest together. "Jehovah of hosts, he is the King of glory." So reads the last verse of the twenty-fourth Psalm ; and Aben Ezra thought that this verse had never yet seen the bril- liant day appointed for it, — namely, the day of the Messiah. The psalm was doubtless prepared originally for the dedication of Solomon's temple. The Lord was to come into the temple in the manifestations of his glory and take possession of his house. The cloud did pass into the holy place and fill it, so that the priests could not stand before the vision. That was the hour when the stanza was to be sung, ^^ Lift up your heads, O ye gates; and be ye lifted up, ye everlasting doors; and the King of glory shall come in. Who is this King of glory ? Jehovah, strong and mighty, Jehovah mighty in battle." The Lord might well be praised, as mighty in battle, within the courts and through all the duration of Solomon's temple. He had given David strength in battle. The most illustrious kings of Judah went into battle, as leaders of hosts, in the strength of the Lord. The glory of Judah in those days was connected with the battle. The next stanza is almost a repetition of this one; yet there are marked differences. "Lift up your heads, O ye gates ; even lift them up, ye everlasting doors ; and the King of glory shall come in. Who is this King of glory? Jehovah of hosts, he is the King of glory. Selah." This is taken by Aben Ezra to be a stanza, not for Solomon's temple, but for the Messiah's, because in the Messiah's day the saints on earth will be 44 THE TRINITARIAN CHARACTER made like the angels, and so the Lord will then be em- phatically the Lord of hosts, even on earth. The stanza cannot have its application to the second temple, because the Lord never took possession of its holy of holies by a miraculous display, and the Shekinah never spoke from its holy apartment. It must, therefore, be a stanza pre- pared especially for the third temple, whiclx the Messiah will build. War is not mentioned in this last stanza, be- cause war will cease under the Messiah, swords will be changed into plowshares and spears into pruning-hooks, and all the nations will dwell quietly in universal peace. In Solomon's temple the praise of the Lord as mighty in battle was appropriate, but a different praise will suit best the Messiah's temple. The great light in the temple then will be Jehovah of hosts, of angels and saints, the King of glory. The illustrious commentator appears confident that Je- hovah of hosts, the King of glory, never appeared in the second temple, and therefore a third temple will arise to restore to Israel the glory of the Shekinah. True it is that such miracles as Solomon witnessed were not con- nected with the second temple in its first days ; neverthe- less, wondrous events drew the eyes of the world to the second temple in its last days. One did appear there driving out the money-changers from its courts and claiming it as his Father's house. He rode to the temple as the King of Zion, amid universal praises, and yet in the most simple humility. He gave it as his sign that the temple should be destroyed and he would raise it up in three days; and he meant the resurrection of his own body from the dead, which was a greater miracle than it would have been to raise that gorgeous temple of Herod up from ruins in three days. Greater humility never ap- peared before the eyes of men, yet he claimed to have OF THE TETRAGRAMMATOM. 45 the services of the hosts of heaven at his call. In the most awful night of his sorrow he prayed that the Father would glorify him, and even that he should be glorified with the Father's own self; and he referred to that glory which he had had with the Father before the world was. He was seen alive, and then crucified, and alive again, by many witnesses. The voice was heard at the temple, from every side, that the gates should lift up their heads, and the doors should be wide open, to receive him as the King of glory. Now be opened, ye doors of the temple, be opened wide, all ye gates of the courts, to receive him as the Lord of hosts, as having all power in heaven and on earth. But the gates and doors were not opened to him ; they all stood locked in unbelief against him. Loving and believing hearts were the only temples where the gates and doors stood open that this King of glory might enter. That temple, in locking him out, locked darkness up within itself, to become only worse and worse. It shut the day out, and shut itself up, never again to be opened to the light. It passed into shadows and into thick darkness, and all the horrors of dungeons dwelt within it. The Lord needed his temple no longer. Its lamps soon went out ; its altars ceased to send holy joy into the heart. The blood of lambs at its altar be- came the same as the blood of an unclean animal ; and what the prophet had said was verified : "he that sacrificeth a lamb, as if he cut off a dog's neck." Isa. Ixvi. 3. M. R. M. LETTER HI.- Worthy Correspondent : — Once, in looking through Homer's Iliad, I noticed par- ticularly that the word oplsso, in Book vi., line 352, stands for the future time, though its proper meaning is ^'■behind,^^ ^'backward ;'^ and this appears to prove that in classic authors both the past time and the future time are assigned to the region of the back, though the com- mon conception is that the future lies in the front rather than at our back. It occurred to me that this might help to explain the answer of the Lord to Moses when, standing at the rock of Horeb after the worship of the golden calf, Moses prayed that he might behold the glory of the Lord. The answer was, that he could not behold the face of the Lord, for no man could behold his face and live, but he might have the sight of his back parts, and when he should be within the inclosure of the rock the Lord would pass by before him, and first the hand of the Lord should be interposed so that he should not see the face, and then it should be removed so that he might look after the Lord and behold his back parts. Since God is a spirit, it would appear that his face and his back parts ought to be found in time, rather than in space. If the great name Jehovah has the present tense in its centre, the face of God ought then to be the centre of the tetragrammaton, while the Ehyeh asher Eh- yeh, I-will'be-that-I-tuill-be, standing on one side for the infinite future, and the Jah, standing on the other side 46 THE SON OF GOD AND THE RESURRECTION. 47 for the infinite past, may be taken as the back parts. The hand of the Lord would lie over the name Jehovah to intercept its central radiance ; and especially would it cover and conceal that Jehovah which was new to Moses and had not been known to the patriarchs ; and in the enumeration of Divine titles which was communicated to Moses within the fissure of the rock, — " Jehovah, Jehovah, God, merciful and gracious," — the Divine hand would lie completely over this second tetragrammaton, and the profound, impenetrable mystery would be in the connec- tion of this second with the first. Or the term which came into use in later ages, Jehovah of hosts, was the per- fect face of God which the Divine hand covered so that Moses could not see it, and it is the radiant face of God which communicates all the blessedness of the present moment to all the hosts of heaven, while the Jah, which fills the past eternity before any host of heaven began to exist, belongs to the back parts of God, and the I-will-be- that-I-will-be, filling the future eternity, belongs also to the back parts. It must here occur to you as a striking coincidence that the name Jehovah is never pronounced in the syna- gogue, and no strictly orthodox Jew would venture to utter it at any time. The synagogue views it as a word wrapped in a cloud and committed to the custody of the Divine hand, as if it is too holy and mysterious ever to be pronounced, and too brilliant to be admitted, like other words, to the gaze of mortals. It is never pronounced according to its letters, but alcph daleth nun yod 2^0. sub- stituted iox yod he vav he, and its vowels are declared to be the vowels of another word, transferred to it. It holds neither its own letters nor its own vowels, as the voice uses it; and, in Hebrew, the letters make the body or frame of the word, while the vowels are the soul. It was 48 THE SON OF GOD given to Moses as the name of God forever, but the syna- gogue has given another meaning to this expression, namely, that it is the name to be kept concealed, the name to be hidden always under another name, and never to be pronounced as its own letters would require. The Talmud lays down the law, in the name of Rabbi Aba Shaul, that those pronouncing the name Jehovah accord- ing to its own letters are cut off from the blessedness of the future world. Remember Rabbi Chanina, son of Theradion, and his wife, how he was condemned to be burnt on the pile, and she was to lose her life by the sword \ and what were their crimes ? His crime was that he had s^ad Jehovah and not Adonai, and his wife's fault was that she had not restrained him. Such being the teaching of the Talmud, it is no wonder that, through many long centuries, it has always been considered the most horrible wickedness to attempt to pronounce the tetra- grammaton in the synagogue, while the other names Eh- yeh asher Ehyeh and Jah, though equally holy, have their own vowels, and are pronounced according to their own letters and vowels without any hesitation. The sound of Jehovah is as completely banished from the synagogue as is the name of the Son of God ; and no synagogue will ever begin to pronounce the name Jehovah in its worship, until Jesus, as the Son of God, begins to be preached in it. These two terms have been banished to equal and opposite distances from the synagogue, one as far towards a holy heaven as the other towards an unholy sphere, and when- ever either of them comes back into the synagogue the other will certainly come with it. The New Testament has similar ideas connected with the veil which Moses placed over his face when he spoke to the people and they could not behold his beaming face. They could not look forward to that great end AND THB: resurrection. 49 which the separation of the Hebrews from all other nations had in view. Their worship presented before them very many beautiful and holy pictures ; but they could not look away beyond to those lines which should be left written on the face of a distant age, when all these pictures would already be taken down. They could not see that the true glory of Moses consisted in his con- nection with the Son of God who should be revealed. The apostle Paul says that the same veil still continues oh their eyes when they hear the Scriptures of Moses read in the synagogues. When they truly turn to the Lord, then the veil will be removed, and they will see that the dis- pensation of the law was only a preparation for a more glorious dispensation. The veil between the eyes of the people and the face of Moses, and the Divine hand be- tween Moses and the face of the Lord, doubtless had the same meaning. The face in the centre of the tetragram- maton, that is, the face of the Son of God, could not then be clearly revealed either to the people or to Moses. The Mosaic system was a luminary in an eclipse, it was a great light with a dark cloud in its centre, and only the corona was shining : the hand of God was this dark cloud covering the centre of the tetragrammaton, concealing its face, holding back its strongest light. The Son of God is not found in the Hebrew Scriptures except with a veil over his face. It is easier to find God the Creator, and the Spirit of God, in the first chapter of Genesis, than to find the Son of God. Whatever may be the strength of our argument for the Trinity, founded on the Divine names Adonai, Jehovah, Elohim, and Kedoshim, the veil is still left covering the centre of the Trinity; and whatever maybe the transcendent clearness of the argument of the apostle in the first chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews, to prove the superiority of the Son c 5 50 THE SON OF GOD of God to the angels, — which argument combines seven texts cited from the Hebrew Bible, four of them referring to the Son of God, two to the angels, and one to God the Creator, — still, the apostle himself must leave the Son of God, in all parts of the Jewish Scriptures, with the veil covering his face. Every attempt to find him there is like an attempt to look at the light above the mercy- seat and between the cherubim when the cloud from Aaron's censer had filled the holy of holies. It is like an attempt to discern an object when a cloud is between and a Divine hand has interposed. And, further, philosophy must assent to this view of the face of God and his back parts, as being the most reason- able. Our mortal eyes can gaze at the sun as it is just rising, or as it is setting, but no one can look up into the sun at noon without danger to the eyes. Moses might behold Jah as the luminary rising up from the depths of the past eternity and making all that eternity the seat of his glory, and he might behold him as holding in perfect subjection to his holy will the most distant future that ever enters man's imagination ; but to behold him as the God of the present time rather than of the distant past or the distant future — to behold him as the Lord of hosts, in whom all the hosts of the universe live and move and have their being — might be to look up directly into his face ; it might be to look up into the luminary in the zenith, above all the heads of men and angels : and this might be the vision which no mortal eyes could bear. But, with these fanciful interpretations now laid aside, I address myself to the more solid argument, namely, to prove that the New Testament has written th'e name Son of God in the brilliant centre of the tetragrammaton, or that Jehovah, as meaning specifically the face of God in contradistinction to his back parts, has become the Son AND THE RESURRECTION. SI of God in the New Testament. I would show how Chris- tianity rends the holy veil of the temple from the top to the bottom, and introduces light into the cloud and dark- ness that filled the most holy chamber, and points to the precise space over the mercy-seat and between the cher- ubim, and the words written there in flashing letters. The Son of God, the King of Israel ; and then it may follow that he was declared to be the Son of God, with power, " by the resurrection from the dead." The first evidence to be adduced is found in the first chapter of John's gospel: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him ; and without him was not any- thing made that was made. In him was life; and the life was the light of men. . . . And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father), full of grace and truth." The Word existed in eternity as being with God, and as being God; but in time he took to himself a true human body and a reasonable soul, and thus the Word became flesh to dwell among us. The eternal glory made the assumed human nature the candlestick from which it should shine. The phrase "full of grace and truth" is transcribed from the proclamation to Moses, "The Lord, the Lord God, merciful and gracious, long-suffering, and abundant in goodness and truth;" and it here has the same connection with the only-begotten Son that the original phrase has with the Lord, the Lord God. Another evidence is furnished by the account of the temptation of Jesus in the wilderness immediately after his baptism. That was the first of all the battles through which Christian doctrine has passed ; and that whole battle had for its ground the name Son of God, as 52 THE SON OF GOD claimed by Jesus. It was unitarianism which then made its first furious drive against the name Son of God. If this name can only be wrapped in a cloud, then all Chris- tianity is banished from the light back into, a dark cloud. Only strike the word Son of God, and you wound Chris- tianity in its head, in its most vital part, and threaten it with the most deadly wound. A doubt concerning the name Son of God is the worst shadow that ever falls on the Christian system. The mighty enemy, the old ser- pent, knew what he was doing when he tried to connect the term Son of God with some kind of doubt. That battle of the wilderness proceeded in this style: If thou be the Son of God, then let one thing be the consequence ; and again : If thou be the Son of God, things might all result in a certain way. The first thing to be gained by the attacking party was to get some kind of an if joined to the Son of God. If thou be the Son of God, the very name implies that thou hast the plenary power of miracle ; then change these stones into bread by a word, and save thyself from starvation. If thou be the Son of God, all the forces of nature are at thy command, all the hosts of heaven obey thee, and all thy life will flow onward in the channel of miracles; and hence if thou shouldst let thy- self drop from the pinnacle of the temple, thou wouldst fall in perfect safety. Look out over all the kingdoms of the world and their glory: thou claimest to be the Son of God, and consequently the heir of all things; but accept me as thy patron, and all shall be made over to thee in a moment. The whole passage has this merit, that it demonstrates what meaning the term Son of God carried from the be- ginning: it meant the supreme Worker of miracles, the Lord of the celestial hosts, and it has already been proved that the appellative meaning of Jehovah is precisely the AND THE RESURRECTION. 53 same. It was this meaning of the name, Son of God, that caused it to be so intensely hated and feared from the beginning. Another evidence lies in the defense of Jesus when he was blamed for a miracle on the sabbath. "Jesus an- swered them. My Father worketh hitherto, and I work." (John V. 17.) Jesus claimed the present seventh day as his own time, and wrought miracles with the same free- dom which the Father had in constructing the world. The Jews were enraged not only because he had broken the sabbath, but because he had called God his Father, making himself equal to God. This same point is proved by that remarkable saying of Jesus recorded in John viii. 58: "Jesus said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you. Before Abraham was, I am." Jesus thus enshrined himself in that present tense which forms the centre of the adorable tetragrammaton. The New Testament having thus seated Jesus as the Son of God in the brilliant centre of the tetragram- maton, — that centre which was covered by the hand of the Lord before the eyes of Moses, so that he could not see it, but which poured its light through the hand, and consequently the hand itself eventually became luminous and ceased to be intercepting, — a question arises. What has the term Son of God, in this high dignity, done for the world ? has it sent forth a celestial light among all nations? Let a moment be given for the answer of the question. It has caused thrones of tyranny everywhere to tremble, and banished idolatry and polytheism from the face of the earth, as the shades of the night flee be- fore the rising sun. The gorgeous temples of idolatry throughout the mighty Roman empire fled before it, the altars of Jupiter and Minerva ceased to smoke, the heathen oracles passed into silence. It aroused all the 5* 54 THE SON OF GOD opposition, of mighty Rome, and endured centuries of the most bloody persecution; but early in the fourth century it triumphed, and saw at its feet the most colossal and mighty system of idolatry on the earth. All the wisdom of Greek philosophers, all the magic of Greek poetry, and all the strength of Rome could not preserve a single god or a single goddess of the old system as a living deity. The Jews themselves at the present time hardly have any life better than a dog's life in those countries where this name is not known, or where it is nearly the same as a name unknown, — that is, not understood as the apostles understood it. It has gone among the people of an island shrouded in the darkest clouds of heathenism, oppressed by their invisi- ble horrible demons, and by their bloody tyrants in the shape of men, and has taught them the most sublime and useful lessons in religion and human rights, and raised them to the position of a light for all the world, and placed among them a press issuing more printed Hebrew Bibles in one year than all the Bibles of Palestine during any thousand years while the Hebrews occupied that land as their home. If this new name, Son of God, holds the centre of the Godhead without any right to that place, then here is idolatry destroying itself, Jupiter slaying Jupiter, Satan casting out Satan, the emjoire of idolatry divided against itself; and such a kingdom can- not stand. This itself proves, as Jesus said, that the kingdom of God has indeed come to you. But the infallible sign confirming the right of Jesus to be placed as the Son of God in the centre of the Trmity, or, which is the same thing, in the brilliant centre of the tetragrammaton where God has his face, was best given by Jesus himself at the first passover of his public min- istry, when the Jews demanded his right to enter the AND THE RESURRECTION. 55 temple and claim it as his Father's house and drive out the money-changers. His, answer was, "Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up." (John ii. 19.) The truth of all the distinctive and essential prin- ciples of Christianity depends on the resurrection of Jesus : if he did arise, all is proved to be true \ if he did not appear alive after his passion, all is a tissue of tlie worst and most stupid falsehoods. The disciples tell of more than seven times when he appeared, and the reality of his appearance could not be doubted. He appeared first to Mary Magdalene, the Sunday morning after his crucifixion, when another woman was on the same ground and not far from her ; he appeared to ten disciples to- gether, and at another time to the eleven, and a third time to the eleven at Jerusalem ; he appeared to seven of them at the Sea of Tiberias, and at another time to five hundred brethren in Galilee. He walked with them, sat with them, ate with them, conversed with them, and offered his person to their touch and closest inspection. The Talmud mentions his crucifixion at the passover, and the accusation against him ; but I suppose that we have no report from the Jews concerning his resurrection except that which Matthew furnishes, that they bribed the soldiers who had had his body in custody through the night, to say that his disciples came by night and stole him away while they were asleep, and that they suc- ceeded in making this story current among themselves. All this story of the women and the disciples must have been told publicly and universally, to friends and enemies, within the fifty daj^s between the crucifixion and the pentecost. It was such a story that it had to be told at the very time, or it never could have gained any credit. If it had been first mentioned as late as the day of pentecost, the universal answer would have been that 56 THE SON OF GOD if it were true it would certainly have been heard many days before ; and every day later than this pentecost only gave a stupendous increase to the difficulty of gaining any credit for the story if it had not been current at an earlier date. The rabbis who lived while the apostles were still alive have given us in the Talmud the desig- nation of the first day of the week as "the day of the Nazarene;" and this indicates that wherever a Nazarene became known the story of the resurrection on the first day of the week accompanied him. There was no fact more universally received among Christians from the beginning, as being true beyond all question, than the resurrection on the third day. There was no event more publicly proclaimed or exhibited in a stronger light of supreme importance. After the third day from the cru- cifixion no one could pretend to be a believer in Jesus who did not admit the truth of the resurrection. If the story was not true, the disciples have not the excuse of enthu- siasm, but they must have been willful liars of the most depraved character. It is very true that a crazy imagi- nation may conjure up the most exciting marvels in rela- tion to ghosts and communications from departed spirits by means of sounds and moving tables and in other ways; but all such marvels leave the old body undisturbed in the grave. Or if it is asserted that the body has risen alive, and search is made and the grave is found empty, then either this is a real resurrection, or there is some most flagrant dishonesty, some strange foul play, in the matter. A crazy enthusiasm has never been known to make graves really empty. If the disciples reported that they feund in the sepulchre the linen clothes, and the napkin wrapped up and laid away from them by itself, and that his body was seen, the same day, alive, when the truth was that they had taken his body out and left the clothes, the AND THE resurrection: 57 dishonesty and barbarity of their character sink to the most contemptible grade. There was the most extreme stupidity connected with this dishonesty. Nothing can be more stupid than to suppose that they could use that wounded and decaying body to make a respectable name for themselves in the world. The Pharisees and Jews who crucified him can, on this supposition of fraud, be easily proved to be as much implicated in the fraud as were the disciples. They had it in their power to expose the fraud. They could have produced the lifeless body, could have laid it before the eyes of witnesses, and this would have instantly brought the story of the resurrec- tion to silence and shame. It was on the second or third morning of the passover feast that the resurrection should have occurred ; the full moon had been shining all night ; the city was crowded with strangers, and doubtless per- sons were walking every street at all hours in the night ; and if the friends did get the body from the sepulchre that night without being seen, the poor Galilean disciples had no home in or near the city where they could have lodged the body so that the Jews could not find it, and they had no grave where they could bury it and their work escape notice. They had no place, either under the ground or above the ground, to which the Jews could not easily have tracked the body. And if they had had all the knowledge of chemistry which Massachusetts now possesses, they could not have made the body disappear in flames and smoke and escape the eyes of the Jews. If the resurrection was not a reality, the body could have been found, and the Jews ought to have produced it ; and by neglecting this matter they stand equally guilty with the disciples in the greatest fraud that has ever gone forth in the world from apostates and liars. The argument here is that the resurrection must be true, because, if it is 58 THE SON OF GOD not, no men ever were more contemptible and willful deceivers than the disciples, and the Jews are equally- responsible for the success of the fraud. If Jesus arose from the dead, the accusation of blasphemy on which he was crucified is proved to be false. This resurrection proves that he had the right to call himself the Son of God, and that he had the right to say that he had the power to lay down his life and the power to take it again, and the right to say, " No man taketh it from me ; but I lay it down of myself." Some scholars attach no particular value to miracles as a confirmation of the truth : they argue that if a thing is true it needs no miracle to prove it true, and if it is not true the most stupendous miracles bring it no help. But here one most glorious fact is strangely overlooked, namely, that, through all the universe, omnipotence and holy truth stand together in close sympathy. Omnipo- tence gives its hand to the truth, but it never gives its hand to help a lie. The lie may indeed have a wonder- ful power at its command to help it on, but this is always a limited power, and omnipotence is never found on its side. Omnipotence always goes with the truth, and never be- trays it, because it is sacredly and eternally wedded, both in heart and in law, to the truth. If Jesus, after his cru- cifixion and the wound in his side by the spear which pierced to his heart, was alive on the third day with the wound perfectly healed, omnipotence restored his life, and no power short of omnipotence could have done it ; and thus omnipotence placed the seal of its own appro- bation on his declaration that he was the Son of God for which he died. Here let one other argument be added, especially for you, my worthy correspondent, as a living teacher in Israel. The miracles of your own Bible are not believed AND THE resurrection: 59 by the prominent rabbis in America ; they are even openly rejected, and are surely doomed to death, except as the resurrection of Jesus furnishes a hope that they may ag^in come to life among your people and bloom in power and beauty as they once did. When the orthodox doctrine concerning miracles dies out from your people, it still continues to bloom in the Christian church by virtue of the power of the resurrection of Jesus ; and your rabbis who now avowedly reject miracles cannot be expected ever to come back to the orthodox faith except on that path which the women traveled to the sepulchre when they found that the body was not there and learned that Jesus was alive. When you deny the reality of miracles, you may as well call the whole Bible a book of heathenism. If there was no miracle on that day when the decalogue was given at Mount Sinai, if the thunder and fire, and the trem- bling of the mountain, and the distinct voice which uttered the commandments, and the engraving of the command- ments on two tables of stone, were all without any mira- cle, then the whole account has precisely the same kind of truth in it that is in Homer's story of the descent of Jupiter in his chariot to Mount Ida, where he diffused a dense vapor all around him, and sent his lightnings flash- ing in the face of the Greek warriors, and held up at noon the golden scales with the lot of death for the Tro- jans at one end and the lot of death for the Greeks at the other end, and the Greek lot sat heavy on the ground, while the Trojan lot mounted to high heaven. Your own Bible must see its miracles placed in the same category with mythological stories, it must become a heathen book in your hands, unless you become a people converted to the faith in the resurrection of Jesus. M. R. M. LETTER IV. Distinguished Hebraist: — I come now to lay before you my argument founded on another Divine name in the Shetnah Yisrael, the name Elohim ; and I must now look at the text in a new light, thus: "Hear, O Israel; Jehovah, our Elohim, is one Jehovah." This word is properly of the plural number, as if it ought to be translated our Sovereigns ; its principal idea is that of power or supreme control. The two Divine names of the Shemah Yisrael are inscribed at the head of the ten commandments. To bring the original words out so as to be more clearly seen, we must read thus : " I am Jehovah thy Elohim, who have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage;" and in the next verse the same word is clearly of the plural num- ber : "Thou shalt have no other Elohifft before me." All the people were familiar with the word in its plural meaning, as is evident from their language in the adora- tion of the golden calf. They said, "These are thy Elohim, O Israel, who have brought thee up from the land of Egypt." (Ex. xxxii. 4.) If it be suggested that in the phrase other Elohim it is the adjective other, being of the plural number, and agreeing with it, that proves it plural, and in this last verse it is the plural verb have brought and the plural pronoun these, both agreeing with it, that prove its real plurality, it is a truthful answer that precisely the same argument can be adduced to prove the 60 THE PLURALITY OF ELOHIM. 6 1 real plurality of the holy name ; because, though in almost all instances the adjectives and verbs agreeing with Elo- him, when it means the living and true God, are of the singular number, yet in some instances this holy name has its adjective in the plural number and its verb in the plural number. If the following texts are examined in the original, — Gen. xx. 13, Josh. xxiv. 19, Deut. v. 26, Jer. x. 10, Jer. xxiii. 36, 2 Sam. vii. 23, the phrases will be found, — '' Ehhifn caused me to wander from my father's house, ' ' — ' ' holy Elohim, ' ' — " the living Elohim, ' ' — "the words of the living Elohim, the Lord of hosts," — "Israel whom Elohim went to redeem for a people to himself," — in each of which there is either a verb or an adjective of the plural number agreeing with Elohim. This is a good indication that the word must not be in- terpreted as divested of all plurality when it stands for the one true God. The word in the singular number is Eloah, this word Elohim being its plural. This Eloah- occurs forty-one times in the book of Job. This book evidently unfolds to us the rich treasures of the patriarchal theology, a theology earlier than that of Moses by several centuries. It contains sublime allusions to the flood, but no allusion to the redemption from Egypt, or any event belonging to the life of Moses, or any later event. The length of the life of Job was such as existed in the time of Jacob ; but men did not live so long in the time of Moses. It is consequently proved that the Divine name Eloah was in very common use among the patriarchs in the time of Job, and it came down to Moses invested with an august and most sacred antiquity. But, with all its recom- mendations, he was very careful how he touched it. He laid it aside, and took the plural word Elohim, and com- menced his account of creation with this word, and 6 62 THE PLURALITY wrote it down thirty-twj times in the first chapter of Genesis. He wrote that most sacred patriarchal word Eloah only twice in all his five books, and these two tjmes belong to one chapter, namely, the thirty-second chapter of Deuteronomy : the word occurs twice in the sublime song of Moses contained in that chapter. Moses acted towards that word like a man going out to sea, who loves an old friend buried on the shore, and takes two pictures of his friend to beautify the side of the ship and keep the old friend in remembrance. So Moses placed the ancient and sacred Eloah in two places in that sub- lime poetry, to be a remembrancer of a holy antiquity; but he did not allow it to have any other place. This indicates how fur it was from his mind to build up a uni- tarian system, because if this had been his object \}oit Eloah was vastly the preferable word. All later writers accepted the hint from Moses, to keep the good unitarian word out of use ; since, according to Buxtorf's Concordance, the word occurs in all the Bible only sixteen times, outside of Job, in which it occurs considerably more than twice as often as it appears in all the other books of the Bible. Cognate to this Eloah is the Divine name El, likewise of the singular number, and equally expressive of the unity of God. It occupied the first place among the patriarchs ; it stood in front of all holy names. In the year before the birth of Isaac, God appeared to Abraham and said to him, " I am El Shaddai [God Almighty] ; walk before me, and be thou perfect." (Gen. xvii. i.) The heathen soothsayer Balaam placed it in the front of holy names, and used it eight times in his four brief poet- ical deliverances. Job likewise sets it in the front, and in many of his verses it occurs in the first line, and the second distich has Shaddai [Almighty] corresponding to it. An example occurs in Job xxxV. 13 : OF ELOIIIM. " Surely El will not hear vanity, Neither will Shaddai regard it." 63 It is eminently the holy name throughout the body of the book of Job. Moses dislodged it from its supreme place in patriarchal theology, and filled its place with the doubly trinitarian tetragrammaton, while Elohi'm, of the plural number and indicative of the plurality of the Deity, was made the substitute for Shaddai. He dis- lodged it from the zenith, and assigned to it a subordi- nate position not very far from the horizon : as in the decalogue, where it is written some distance below the trinitarian terms at the head, and comes in as the noun with which the adjective jealous agrees, giving us the ex- pression a jealous El; and as in the revelation to Moses in connection with the second tables of the law, where the tetragrammaton is written twice at the head, and El follows as the noun to which the adjectives are joined : ^^ El, merciful and gracious, long-suffering, abundant in goodness and truth." In tlie tenth chapter of Deuter- onomy there again appears to be this same difficulty in connecting adjectives directly with the tetragrammaton or with plural Divine names ; hence, after the words "For the Lord your God is the God of gods and the Lord of lords," when the adjectives "great," "mighty," and " terrible " must be used, the word ^/ comes in, that they may be joined to it ; and to make the original plu- rality of the words before it visible in the English lan- guage, we must read, " For Jehovah your Elohim, he is Gods of gods and Lords of lords." And so when the unity of God comes forth in the most distinct and pecu- liar emphasis, when it shines out in its most distinctive' lustre, when it presents its sharpest antagonism to all polytheism, the plural names are still preferred to those of the singular number, and where an English ear hears. (54 THE PLURALITY " O give thanks unto the God of gods ; for his mercy endureth forever. O give thanks to the Lord of lords ; for his mercy endureth forever," the Hebrew ear receives the words Elohe Haelohim, Adone Haadonim, every one of them of the plural number, and requiring, as an exact translation, Gods of gods and Lords of lords. See Ps. cxxxvi. 2, 3. Another patriarchal name, intensely of the singular number and inflexibly repugnant to all plurality, strongly expressive of the unity of the Dejty, is Shaddai, the origi- nal of the English word Almighty. It occurs thirty-one times in Job. The oracles of the heathen soothsayer Baalam contain it in two places. The good woman Naomi brought it with her back into Israel after she had lived many years among the heathen, and uttered it twice. Moses left it entirely beyond and below the hori- zon of his theology ; he could not permit it to occur even once in his laws, or his prophecies, or his poetry, or any part of the Bible which was properly his own fre^i and free composition. He permits it to occur six times in Genesis as a most holy name with the patriarchs Abra- ham, Isaac, and Jacob. He writes it twice as a word spoken by Balaam. He writes it once as a word belong- ing to a communication from the Lord, in Ex. vi. 3 : "And I appeared," says the Lord, "unto Abraham, unto Isaac, and unto Jacob, by the name oi El Shaddai ; but by my name Jehovah was I not known to them." In vain you search for this word in any other verse of the pentateuch. The best of all holy names for the building up of a unitarian system of theology was this name Shad- dai ; and if a complex term is preferable, the most ap- propriate of all for unitarian theology is El Shaddai. But, though this complex term came to Moses invested with the highest sacredness, as used by Abraham and OF ELOHIM. 65 Isaac and Jacob, and placed by Job in the brilliant front of all holy names, he would not touch it ; he would not see it written even once in all the heavens and earth of the proper Mosaic theology. It continued always, after the time of Moses, to be a word almost banished out of use ; and I may here raise the question whether it occurs more than twice in all the book of Psalms. These graphic facts prove that Moses never intended to furnish Israel with a system of unitarian theology. The best Divine names for the teaching of Unitarianism he banished almost completely from his school and books, and took in their place names of unquestionable plurality, such as Elohim, Adonai, and Adonim, words which Uni- tarians cannot consistently use, and which they never pretend to use, except figuratively, or as plurals of majesty, or out of politeness to the multitude of heathen idols. It is infinite injustice to Moses to say that he wished to furnish his nation with the sentence, "Hear, O Israel: Shaddai our El is one Shaddai," as their Divine motto and watchword. What he wished was to banish the patri- archal name Shaddai completely out of sight from the whole sphere of the distinctive Mosaic system ; and he had his wish. Yet this outrageous injustice is precisely what all the synagogues of the world are now doing to Moses by their Unitarianism ; inasmuch as they admit no Trini- tarianism and no real plurality in the Adonai and the Elohim, and make them really of the singular number, as Shaddai is, and interpret them as being of the same im- port. There was no old-fogyism with Moses. He did not make it the study of his life to be able to tell what Rabbi Jacob said in the name of Rabbi Isaac, what Rabbi Isaac said in the name of Rabbi Abraham, or what Rabbi Terah 6* 66 THE PLURALITY said in the name of Rabbi Noah : his aim was to furnish those new sayings which should be the life of the future, and give light and joy to the millions who should arrive on the shore of being ages after he had fallen asleep in death. It was not his aim to have his name glow in the shadow of some ancient patriarch, but he sent his name forward to the distant future ages. He was progressive in the highest sense of the term. It is a most significant fact that the God who sent him back to Egypt gave as his name I-will-be'that-I-wiU-be ; he was the God of future ages, and Moses was to become the man of the future. When he started out on the sea, he left the shores of patriarchal theology behind him, having the ne\v name of Jehovah, which had not been known to the patriarchs, at the head of the mast, to guide him ; and he boldly went out on the vast ocean to find a new world and higher Elysian fields of theology directly under the sun, which the patriarchs had died without seeing. This ship was constructed only for the voyage ; it was not to be either the house or the temple on the new Elysian fields. The altar sprinkled with blood was not to last always. Lambs and goats were not always to feed the fire on the altar. The worship by bloody sacrifices was an excellent institution for certain ages, but the world was to outgrow the need of such a worship. The man who prays that the altar and bloody sacrifices may be restored to Jerusalem certainly does not understand where the world now is or how it has been moving. Far in the distance, on that ocean of the future, was the little isle of Patmos. We find on this isle the prophet John, the Revelator, who wrote the last book of the New Testament. Moses is the other great prophet, who wrote the first book of the Bible. Let us see if this first pro- phet and this last prophet can here meet and speak in OF ELOHIM. 67 harmony. The first sounds that are heard on Patmos are, "Grace be unto you, and peace, from him which is, and which was, and which is to come." Tiiis is the tetra- grammaton itself unfolded according to the abstract Trinity which lodges in it. This is the ineffable name translated into Greek, that name most holy, even holy, holy, holy, which was inscribed as the highest name on the flag which Moses unfurled. What sound comes next? "And from the seven Spirits which are before his throne." The seven Spirits are the round, full- orbed, complete name for the one Spirit of God, the Holy Ghost. They are, as the Hebrew prophet Zecha- riah says, the seven eyes of the Lord which run to and fro through the whole earth. They are the seven lamps burning before the eternal throne. They are that spirit of the Lord which Isaiah says should rest upon the Son of David ; and this prophet pictures them as being the holy candlestick with seven burners : first, at the top of the main shaft, and as the centre of all and above all, is the spirit of the Lord ; and then, a little lower, on the right side and the left, are the two lamps the "spirit of wisdom and understanding;" these count three: then, a little lower and a little farther off, on the same sides, the two lamps the "spirit of counsel and might;" these count five : then, still lower and still farther off, on the same sides, the two lamps the "spirit of knowledge and of the fear of the Lord ;" and these fill up the number of seven. We have supposed that the Divine name I-will-be- that-I-will-be means especially this same Spirit, or the seven eyes of the Lord which penetrate all the infinite future. If this is correct, these seven Spirits unfold the distinct mys- tery at the beginning of the tetragrammaton. The words that next follow are these: "And from Jesus Christ, who is the faithful witness, and the first-begotten of the dead, 68 THE PLURALITY and the prince of the kings of the earth. Unto him that loved us, and washed us from our sins in his own blood, and hath made us kings and priests unto God and his Father." His Father ! This appears to mean God of tlie past eternity, God before all ; and if so, it is the Jah at the other extremity of the tetragrammaton. And so, with the seven Spirits of God at one end, and the Eternal Father at the other end, let us now scrutinize all that lies between, and give particular attention to the interjacent central Person, inasmuch as the space that he fills here appears to be the centre of the tetragrammaton. He is " Jesus Christ, who is the faithful witness." Just as the present day gives us the voice of all the past, and truthfully represents the past, so Jesus as the faithful wit- ness is the voice from eternity, the voice of eternal wis- dom, counsel, and love. He is "the first-begotten of the dead." Not strictly the first-begotten of the dead in the chronological sense, because some had awaked from the dead previously to his resurrection ; but the first-begotten of the dead in the sense of supreme dignity. He is the first-begotten very much as Joseph became the first-born of Jacob though he was not his father's eldest son. He is like another Joseph cast out from his brethren ; "he came unto his own, and his own received him not;" and the words which Jacob addressed to Joseph as his first-born are very applicable to this first-begotten: "The archers have sorely grieved him, and shot at him, and hated him: but his bow abode in strength, and the arms of his hands were made strong by the hands of the mighty God of Jacob." O ye people of Israel ! when you read the word of the Lord by the prophet Zechariah, " I will pour upon the house of David, and upon the inhabitants of Jerusalem, the spirit of grace and of supplications ; and they shall look upon me whom OF ELOHIM. 69 they have pierced, and they shall mourn for him, as one mourneth for his only son," and your rabbis tell you that this predicts the death of the Messiah, the son of Joseph, who will fall in battle, will you not turn your thoughts to this other son of Joseph whose hands and side were pierced? He has been hated, so that the Tal- mud tells how he has been reported to be in hell, suffer- ing from the heat there, with the most horrible filth seething all around him; but hear his title at Patmos, ^' the first-begotten of the dead,'' the highest one among all that have been made alive from sin unto God and triumphed over the penalty of sin which is found in death and the grave. He is "the prince of the kings of the earth." He is not only the first-begotten in the great world of the righteous and blessed dead, but he is the prince of living kings on earth. He is supreme among all who have been raised to life from a moral death, and he is supreme in all that living world which traces its origin back to the agitated chaos at the beginning of our creation. "Unto him that loved us, and washed us from our sins in his own blood." Here comes the live coal from off the Divine altar, and it touches the lips of the prophet John, as it once touched the lips of Isaiah. Neither of these prophets can speak except as there is the altar to send its coal to his lips and as there is the vision of atoning blood at the altar. John beholds the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world. The remission of sins is still by the shedding of blood. Everything looks as if Moses has come to meet John here on Patmos and rejoice in this clearer revelation of the triune God. As straight as ever a ship cuts a path from New York to Liverpool, Moses started for this point, and moved steadily through all the storms on the sea of 70 THE PLURALITY OF ELOHIM. fifteen hundred years, for this harbor of Patmos. His back turned to the patriarchal shore indicates this. His back turned to the best terms expressive of the unity of God, as Eloah and El and Shaddai and El Shaddai, in- dicates this. The transcendently trinitarian tetragram- maton, floating in the wind over his ship at the highest point of the mast, indicates this. His marked choice of the Divine names of unquestionable plurality indicates this. But Unitarianism would turn his ship right around, and send it back into the old patriarchal harbor whence it started. M. R. M. Note. — The patriarch Melchizedek appears to have preferred the Divine name El to all others. "And Melchizedek king of Salem brought forth bread and wine ; and he was the priest of El most high. And he blessed him, and said, Blessed be Abram of El most high, pos- sessor of heaven and earth: and blessed be El most high, who hath de- livered thine enemies into thy hand. And he gave him tithes of all." Gen. xiv. 18-20. LETTER V. My learned Correspondent: — Each of the Divine names which have been examined diffuses a peculiar light through all the great text of the Unity, the Shemah Yisrael. Let each name be taken by itself, as follows : First, the name Adonai. Hear, O Israel : The three persons that appeared to Abraham the day before the overthrow of Sodom were his holy Adoiiai : they, as being Jehovah, conversed with him ; and this most holy name does not appear to have belonged to any one of them more than to the other two ; they appear equal in wisdom, power, and glory, in the dignity of their name, the effulgence of mercy, and the blaze of vengeance ; they appear insepa- rable, as seems to be indicated by the verse, "And Jehovah rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brim- stone and fire from Jehovah out of heaven" (Gen. xix. 24) ; as if the one who had conversed with Abraham, and had not manifested himself to Lot, and was in the invisi- bility of the heavenly state when Sodom was overthrown, is to be considered as having been present and co-operat- ing with the other two who bore the same name, Jehovah, and who visibly led Lot out from the city and brought the fire on the place. Yet know that all this does not mean tritheism in any sense: the Divine essence is one. Secondly, the tetragrammaton. 71 72 UNITARIANISM NOT SO MUCH JEWISH Hear, O Israel : He who is Jehovah, in whom all the past eternity and all the future has its existence, and in whom lives the transient present moment, — even that never-dying present moment in which all created beings have the whole of their consciousness, — He, neverthe- less, has all the infinite past and all the infinite future together as being only one moment with him, — as being his present moment, one, indivisible, and unchangeable. Hear, O Israel : Consider and understand that, though the great name Jehovah did first, in the presence of Moses, that greatest prophet who knew God face to face, myste- riously develop itself into three distinct Divine names, namely, the Jah referring to the past, and the Ehyeh asher Ehyeh referring to the future, and the interjacent Jehovah which was not known to Abraham, that is, not known precisely in this peculiar form, and though these three names are equally Divine, perfect, and glorious, equally incomprehensible and incapable of being ever transferred to any being of the whole creation, and impossible to be substituted one for another, — yet the unity of Jehovah, as held by the patriarchs, remains, and these three are essentially one. Thirdly, the name Elohim. Hear, O Israel : The names Elohim and Adonim, of the plural number, with many others of the plural number in the Hebrew tongue, were clearly preferred as names for God by Moses and the prophets who followed, and they rose to be great lights in the heavens of Judaism, while the venerable names El and Eloah and Shaddai, of the singular number and the patriarchal age, descended close to the horizon and almost fell beneath it; but these holy names of the patriarchal time are radiant with the most essential truth, and the luminous monotheism so beautifully expressed by them must ever be maintained ; AS MOHAMMEDAN. 73 and he who is Elohim the plurality is also El the unity; he who is Adonim the plurality is also Shaddai, the One, the Almighty, the Unity. It may be a plurality of forms of being or of centres of internal relations, but it is a unity of inner being, a unity of uncreated life and unde- rived omnipotence and moral perfection and boundless love. Such is the trinitarian interpretation of the great text the Shemah Yisrael : and here the two interpretations, the unitarian and the trinitarian, ought to be carefully ex- amined, and their differences clearly marked. Unita- rianism interprets this text as the stamp of unity upon unity, while Trinitarianism interprets it as the stamp of unity on diversity or plurality. The unitarian interpre- tation is fairly illustrated by such a watchword as the following among Americans : Hear, O Americans ! George Washington, our first President, was ofie George Washing- ton. Learned Jews have perceived the great difficulty, the flat and bald tautology, in this interpretation ; and Aben Ezra suggested two modes of relief. One was to make Elohim the principal predicate, — Hear, O Israel : Jehovah is our God, Jehovah is one ; the other was to give the two tetragrammatons different meanings, making one the proper name and the other the appellative, as if one should read. Hear, O Israel : Jehovah our God is the one Universe-Sustainer. It must be admitted that such a motto containing the name of Washington might be useful to Americans ; it must also be admitted that the text before us expresses a great truth even as Unitarians interpret it ; and this would probably be the only possible interpretation if the text were found only in the Greek language or in the English, because in these languages Elohitn as a Divine name never appears as plural, and the trinitarian character of the word Jehovah cannot be D 7 74 UNITARIANISM NOT SO MUCH JEWISH exhibited in a translation. The trinitarian interpreta- tion may be illustrated by the American motto, E pbiri- btis unum. One argument in favor of it is that it gives the text a compass and sublimity beyond any other inter- pretation. The Unitarian finds in this text a surrounding wall of defense for the eternal Godhead against the false gods of man's creation ; the Trinitarian beholds it as an exhibition of glorious truths and mysteries which have their place within the Godhead. The Unitarian holds the chief value of this text to be extrinsic ; the Trinitarian holds it to be intrinsic. The Unitarian holds it as a text in polemic theology; the Trinitarian holds it as a text in didactic theology. The Unitarian uses it to fight"against the idols on earth; the Trinitarian views it as the glass through which he will gaze at the refulgent mysteries of the Divine nature in the never-ending peace and joy of heaven. The Trinitarian interpretation is the more sub- lime ; and this is a good evidence that it is the true interpretation. We now drop these single words on which we have dwelt so long, and pass into wide religious spheres, to find out the true dwelling-place of Unitarianism. First, Unitarianism as opposed to Trinitarianism has no home in genuine Christianity. There was a Trinity at the baptism of Jesus, the Father by a voice from heaven acknowledging his beloved Son, the Son walking up from the water, the Holy Ghost descending in the form of a dove; and there is the Trinity in that baptism which Jesus left to be administered by his disciples among all nations; and any public life or any theological system which thus commences and finishes with the Trinity must itself be essentially trinitarian through all its length and breadth. Two such gates never stand at the opposite sides of a unitarian city as those that stand one at the AS MOHAMMEDAN. IS beginning and the other at the close of the public life of the Son of man. It will require more time to go from gate to gate through that holy Judaism that commenced with Moses fifteen hundred years before Cloristianity and flourished through so many centuries. One of the first prophets on whom the eye of the Christian falls, as he looks from his own system back into Judaism, is the late prophet Zecha- riah; and Zechariah may first be interrogated whether his Judaism was essentially unitarian. His answer is prompt. Three things must be observed near the begin- ning of his prophecies. First, the Lord speaks towards the close of the third chapter, who will bring forth his servant the Branch: the Lord bringing forth this Branch is one person. Secondly, the Branch himself is still another person, and appears to be the same with the mysterious stone in which the Lord will carve the seven eyes which are the seven "eyes of the Lord which run to and fro through the whole earth."* The same Branch is found * Aben Ezra decides that the Branch in this third chapter of Zechariah is Zerubbabel ; but he adds, "Many expositors say that this Branch is the Messiah, who is called Zerubbabel because he will be of his seed, as it is also said, ' And David my servant will be a prince over them forever.' " The Targum gives the paraphrase, ■•Sjnn Nn''!:'D ''1257 n'' Tiid njn nh " See, I bring forth my servant the Messiah who shall be revealed." Jonathan ben Uzziel calls the Branch of the Lord, in the fourth chapter of Isaiah, " the Messiah of the Lord." As to the point whether this stone mentioned immediately afterwards means the same person with the Branch, when I read how seven eyes are set on this stone, and the Lord declares that he himself will carve them on it, and these seven are afterwards explained, " They are the eyes of the Lord which run to and fro through the whole earth," and I reflect that the eyes are the peculiar windows through which the soul itself is seen in its sharpest emotions ; — when I follow on into the New Testa- ment, and find the expressions concerning Jesus, " These things saith he that hath the seven Spirits of God," — " In the midst of the elders stood a 76 UNITARIANISM NOT SO MUCH JEWISH away back in Isaiah: ''In that day shall the Branch of Jehovah be beautiful and glorious" (iv. 2); the same Lamb as it had been slaiii, having seven horns and seven eyes, which are the seven Spirits of God sent forth into all the earth," I cannot doubt that the stone engraved with seven eyes reappears in the New Testament as being the Messiah. The stone is found in Isaiah xxviii. i6 : " There- fore thus saith the Lord God, Behold, I lay in Zion for a foundation a stone, a tried stone, a precious corner-stone, a sure foundation: he that believeth shall not make haste ;" — on which verse Rashi, the prince of rabbinical commentators, has this comment: " Behold, I am he who has laid already in Zion the stone — already is the decree fixed before me, and I have established the King the Messiah, who shall be in Zion for a stone of proof, meaning citadel and strength, as in the phrases, ' The forts and towers shall be for dens,' ' They set up the towers thereof " Add to this the authority of the Talmud. " Even the Babylonish Talmud, Tract. Sanhedrin, fol. 38, i, and the book Sohar," says Tholuck on the last verse of the ninth chapter of the Epistle to the Romans, " interpret this passage of the Messias (see Schottgen, Horse Talm., t. ii. pp. 170, 290, 607)." It is so interpreted repeatedly and most explicitly in the New Testament. The stone in the dream of Nebuchadnezzar was cut out without hands, and it broke in pieces the earlier mon- archies and became a great mountain and filled the whole earth ; and no one will doubt that this stone is the Messiah. The stone, in the eighth chapter of Isaiah, is described as being the Lord, first a sanc- tuary, then a stone of stumbling and a rock of offense to both the houses of Israel : " and many among them shall stumble, and fall, and be broken, and be snared, and be taken;" and the aged Rabbi Simeon, as he held the child Jesus in his arms and spoke the words, " Behold, this child is set for the fall and rising again of many in Israel ; and for a sign that shall be spoken against," doubtless referred to this passage in Isaiah. These are a few facts to illustrate how ancient scholars of the highest authority, both Jews and Christians, agree in finding the Messiah under the title of the stone. They agree, too, that Zerubbabel and Joshua the priest were men to be wondered at, men of marvelous character, as prefiguring the Branch whom the Lord would bring forth before the people. It is true that the modern rabbis do not admit the Messianic character of many passages which the ancient rabbis interpreted in this light ; but this does not impair the value of the ancient Jewish interpretations when they harmonize with the Christian. AS MOHAMMEDAN^. 77 stone, too, is found in Isaiah to be the Lord of hosts, both a sanctuary and a stone of stumbhng, a rock of offense, to both the houses of Israel (viii. 13, 14); and the same stone reappears long afterwards, — five hundred years afterwards, — in the last book of the New Testament, as the Lamb that has been slain, "having seven horns and seven eyes, which are the seven Spirits of God sent forth into all the earth," the strength of the stone being here indicated by the seven horns, and its omniscience by the seven eyes. And, thirdly, the Spirit of the Lord is still another person as he is found in the fourth chapter: " This is the word of the Lord unto Zerubbabel, saying, Not by might, nor by power, but by my spirit, saith the Lord of hosts." These three points have only to be reviewed closely to identify in them the Chris- tian Trinity. The earlier prophet Ezekiel has his three memorable chapters commencing with his vision in the valley of dry bones, and there he likewise presents the same three points. First, he has the Lord himself, who brings him out in the spirit into the valley of the dead, and unfolds to him the future ; secondly, he has David, the Lord's servant, who will be one Shepherd over all the tribes of Israel and will be king over them forever; — yes, the Jews well said to Jesus, as they looked back to this prophecy, that the Messiah abideth forever; and, thirdly, he has the Holy Ghost at the close of these illus- trious visions of prosperity and vengeance, in this verse, " Neither will I hide my face any more from them ; for I have poured out my spirit upon the house of Israel, saith the Lord God" (Ezek. xxxix. 29,); and these three of Ezekiel are none other than the three of the Christian Trinity. Isaiah, at a still earlier period, and when the throne of David had its golden age, brought forward the same three very clearly. First, here are the illustrious 7* 78 UNITARIANISM NOT SO MUCH JEWISH verses to which Jesus himself invited particular attention : "The Spirit oi Adonai Jehovah is upon me; because the Lord hath anointed me to preach good tidings unto the meek ; he hath sent me to bind up the broken-hearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound." An earlier prophecy was in these words: "And there shall come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots. And the spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and of the fear of the Lord." No one needs to inquire here, Where is God, the fountain of every blessing, in these verses? or, Where is the Son of David? or. Where is the Holy Ghost? There maybe concentrations of peculiar light in the Trinity Of the New Testament which are not found in these passages, just as powerful rays are now found in the spectrum which were never perceived by Sir Isaac Newton ; but the spectrum is the same now that it was in his day; and it is the same Trinity of Zechariah, Ezekiel, and Isaiah that reappears in the powerful light of the New Testament. The blessing which the priests were appointed to pro- nounce consists of three parts, and contains distinctly the three ideas of God, as the fountain of all blessing, the effulgence of all blessing, and the effectual applica- tion of the blessing to the inner life of the man. " The Lord bless thee and keep thee," points to the fountain of all blessing in God, and to his choice of a people to be brought near himself and to live forever in his presence, and corresponds to " the love of God" in the Christian benediction. "The Lord make his face shine upon thee, and be gracious unto thee," expresses the pouring forth of the blessing in a flood of light; it points to the AS MOHAMMEDAN. 79 Shekinah, the angel of God's face, suggests to the Chris- tian the Son of God who is the brightness, the radiation of the Father's glory, and corresponds to the term in the benediction, "the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ," "The Lord lift up his countenance upon thee, and give thee peace," points to the blessing penetrating into all the depths of the soul, when truth, comfort, and peace mingle with all the inner life ; and this is the work assigned to the Holy Ghost in the Christian scheme. These three concentrations of blessing are perfectly suited to the three persons of the Trinity as their centres. Unitarianism as contradicting Trinitarianism is thus, by a fair argument, expelled from the whole field of Judaism ; but does it really lodge in that patriarchal theology which was earlier than Moses ? It would appear as if it ought to be found in that theology if it has any place in the Bible, because the names in the singular number for God, such as Eloah, El, Shaddai, and El Shaddai, shone more brilliantly then as the most holy terms than ever they did afterwards. But the plural name Adonai, originating with Abraham, raises a dififi- culty, and makes its protest against the theory that the patriarchs were Unitarians. The three who appeared to Abraham have been already pointed out as his holy Adonai ; and this same word as found in the account of that vision by which Isaiah was called to the office of a prophet is interpreted in the New Testament as standing for both Jesus and the Holy Ghost. The religion of Greece has been thoroughly investi- gated, and the following language expresses the conclu- sion : "The life and essence of all things is from God. Plato's idea of God is of the purest and highest kind. God is one, he is Spirit, he is the supreme and only real being, he is the creator of all things, his providence is 8o UNITARIANISM NOT SO MUCH JEWISH over all events. He avoids pantheism on one side, by making God a distinct personal intelligent will; and polytheism on the other, by making hira absolute, and therefore one. Plato's theology is pure theism. There is no doubt that Plato was a monotheist, and believed in one God, and when he spoke of gods in the plural was only using the common form of speech." This extract is from the "Ten Great Religions," by James Freeman Clarke, page 295, where the religion of Greece is dis- cussed. The American Indians had a sublime conception of the Great and Good Spirit, the fountain of life, the source of every blessing ; this was with them the one supreme Spirit ; and if it could be proved that the evil spirit which they feared was only a created being of a high order, who had apostatized from his primitive holi- ness, and if they had not been guilty of the worship of the sun and moon, they would certainly in their simple faith have furnished one of the most beautiful exhibitions of Unitarianisra. But it would have been Unitarianism growing on heathen ground. Arabia furnishes the best exhibition of Unitarianism. The Koran is the most thoroughly unitarian book. It teaches its disciples to detest the Trinity, and especially to view with inexpressible contempt the term Son of God, as orthodox Christians understand it. The Mussul- man has no time and no will to reason on the question whether God has an Eternal Son ; because simply to mention the question only produces loathing. The ques- tion needs no examination, and he must look on the believer in the Son of God either with profound pity or with a will to see him perish instantly as a polytheist. His Koran gives him the most simple and reasonable faith, namely, one God, one everlasting Father, with AS MOHAMMEDAN. 8l no plurality of Divine persons; and he has no heart for any addition of mysteries to that faith. These Uni- tarians now number a population vastly exceeding a hun- dred millions. The early followers of Mohammed were men of flaming zeal. They looked on idolatry as the worst curse of the world, and they felt that they were spreading the greatest possible blessing in bringing all nations to the faith in the unity of God. It was never their profession that their faith was for themselves alone, and that they had no wish for converts : on the con- trary, they were the most bold and enthusiastic propa- gandists, and believed that their own sublime faith ought to be accepted by every man, and that their highest duty to the world was to make it spread. Most mighty and wonderful was the empire that they established in a few years, from Persia and India, through Asia, Africa, and Europe, to the Atlantic Ocean. And when they pene- trated to this ocean, the zeal of one of their chiefs called for a dividing of the waters, that they might march to a new world and there teach the unity of God. History has written on an everlasting rock the follow- ing concatenated truths, namely, that Abraham had two sons, Isaac and Ishmael; that the promise was never given to Ishmael, but it was to Isaac ; that in Isaac's posterity all the families of the earth should be blessed ; that a gene- alogy sacred among Christians connects Jesus with Isaac, and a genealogy sacred among Mohammedans connects Mohammed with Ishmael ; that Isaac has given the world the New Testament and Christianity, while Ishmael has given the world the Koran and Unitarianism; and that if Unitarianism as opposed to Trinitarianism is indeed the truth and the world's greatest blessing, Ishmael has most singularly established this blessing in the world, the promise has been fulfilled in Ishmael, and Isaac has failed, 82 UNITARIANISM NOT SO MUCH JEWISH and what the Lord promised especially to Isaac has proved false. Tjiis alone ought to be, with all who believe the Bible, a perfectly convincing argument against Unitarianism. The Unitarianism of the Koran has this interesting consistency, that it sends man to reason rather than to miracles to receive the great lessons of religion. Mohammed acknowledged his inability to produce such miracles as Moses and other Hebrew prophets produced. His religion does not claim to have the support of prodigies which convinced and dazzled the multitude. Now, it is becoming well known that Unitarianism natu- rally engenders a distrust of all miracles, and already many have lost all faith in both the miracles of Moses and those of Jesus. The Koran can accommodate such persons with a religion that does not depend on miracles. Further, Mohammedan Unitarianism is proved to be an article of excellent quality, by the earnestness with which it set the world on fire in the first centuries of its history. The Mohammedans believed in the infinite im- portance of their faith in the unity of God, for all the world ; they were not the people to possess the most holy truth for themselves and live with no concern whether others possessed it or not. And if in the present day they still retain all their primitive hatred of idolatry and of trinitarian Divinity, while a coldness has come over their zeal to make the acknowledgment of the Divine unity universal in the world, this only proves that that moon which was once splendidly waxing is now ominously waning, and gives us the right to say that they were once as the youthful, ardent, ruddy warrior, mounted on his steed and having no fear of heat or storm or fire or battle, but now they are more like the pale face marked with extreme age, which seeks rest in the quiet shade. Ardor of youthful blood is always to be ad- AS MOHAMMEDAN. 83 mired ; we must admire this in the Mohammedan religion ; and any religion is in a bad condition if the zeal of its youth has left it and its earnestness to shower blessings from its hand over the world has declined. It must also be said in praise of Mohammed that the distinction was clear in his mind, and is presented clearly in the Koran, between Jesus as the son of a virgin and the orthodox Christian view of Jesus as the Son of God, and that he showed a sacred regard for Christianity with this one exception, that he made the most diametrical opposition to the Trinity. The Son of God was a term which appeared to him only as an abomination, but the son of the Virgin Mary was a term in which he fully be- lieved. Many chapters of the Koran might be adduced in proof of this statement, and particularly the third, the fourth, and the nineteenth. In one place the statement occurs, ''Jesus is before God like Adam, whom he pro- duced from the. earth and said. Let him be, and he was." In another place we read, "Verily Christ Jesus, the son of Mary, is the apostle of God, and his word, which he conveyed unto Mary, and his spirit. Believe therefore in God and his apostle, but make no mention of a Trinity. Avoid this, and it will prove better for you. There exists one God alone. Far be it from him that he should have a son. All things in heaven and on earth are his, and this God is a sufficient protector." In another place a story is told concerning Mary, in which the miraculous concep- tion of Jesus is the chief point. The Mussulman is taught to have no doubt that the prophecy of Isaiah proved true, that a virgin should become the mother of a son, and this should be one of the wonders in Israel; and it appears to him perfectly consistent to admit the miraculous concep- tion and with the same breath express the utmost contempt for the dogma of the asserted oneness of Jesus with God. 84 UNITARIANISM NOT SO MUCH JEWISH It would be a pleasant sight if, in this free charitable country of America, the rabbis could be seen united in speaking as kind words concerning Jesus as Mohammed spoke. If they both reject Jesus as the Son of God and revile him as a prophet, they treat him with greater con- tumely than Mohammed did. If they must disown him as the Son of God, this does not compel them to despise him as the son of David or to reject the miracle of the Virgin's conception. Christians would be pleased to com- pliment American rabbis as holding to a Unitarianism which can speak as respectful and kind words of Jesus as any thing the Koran contains; for assuredly a Unitarian- ism more bigoted and bitter than Mohammedanism is not needed. But Mohammedanism, though commended by its re- liance on reason, by its flaming zeal to convert all the world to the tenet of the Divine unity, and by its re- spectful language concerning the son of Mary, is not the religion for the Jews. Salvation was to be of the Jews, not of the race of Ishmael. The saying of the last Hebrew prophet is never to be forgotten, that the Lord had loved Jacob, but had hated Esau. It would be a most foolish bargain in any Israelite to exchange his home at Jerusalem for any land of Arabia, for any palace either in Petra or in Mecca, even if all the sand of the region could be laid at his feet changed into gold. The triune theism of Judea ought never to be given up for the Unitarianism of Mecca. The throne of David was to be in all ages the great centre of the true light ; it was never to be eclipsed by any throne of Mohammed ; it has the glorious promise written on it, " For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counselor, The mighty God, The everlasting AS MOHAAIMEDAN. 85 Father, The Prince of peace. Of the increase of his government and peace there shall be no endj" and no throne of Arabia, or Ishmael, or Edom, or Mohammed, or Omar, stands on any such promise. There is no such promise supporting the mosque of Omar in Jerusalem, though it has stood there more than a thousand years — longer than both Solomon's temple and the second temple together ; and no sanctuary has ever existed in the world more decidedly unitarian than it is. But it belongs not to the Jewish religion; it proclaims the desolate reign of heathenism ; and the Lord who dwelt between the cherubim does not know it as his house. The Jews are not permitted to embrace Mohammedan- ism, since it is not the genuine Judaism ; and it is indeed lamentable if any of them inculcate a Unitarianism still more degraded than Mohammedanism, having more bitter and contemptuous words to utter against Jesus and the Christian faith, and no belief in any of the miracles recorded in the Bible. M. R. M. LETTER VI. Esteemed Friend : My last letter to you is the last which I can expect to see published in the Israelite ; but as your later letter has come to me, in which I read as follows, " But I am by no means willing, after that you have challenged me to a debate, to consider our debate as broken off sine die,^^ I may be permitted to answer you that probably I am fully as unwilling as you are that our debate should close here, with no further letters coming before the eye of the public. Unquestionably you are an admirer of the illustrious rabbi of the twelfth century, Aben Ezra; and if I take from him my text for the present letter you may be better pleased than if I should take it from the New Tes- tament. He supplies me with an excellent text for a trinitarian discourse, in his notes on Exodus iii. 15 : "And God said moreover unto Moses, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel : Jehovah the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, hath sent me unto you : this is my name forever, and this is my memorial unto all gen- erations." Let me here read you his note: Dxyn niDtr on nictt' nii'Virn nVxi ni muDi "laiD irNa' Tm .1 translate it: ^^ And God said moreover. Another name ; and it is of the meaning of the first one ; only the one is in the language of the one speaking, but this is 86 RELATIONS OF FAITH, HOPE, AND LOVE. 87 the language of the person not speaking, and is of a piece with Jah ; and these three names are names of the es- sence" (proper nouns). Most wilHngly do I accept Aben Ezra's explanation, as here given, of the three Divine names, and all three proper nouns, and make it my text for the present letter. The name to which he refers as the first one is Ehyeh asher Ehyeh (I-will-be-that-I-will-be). The other name is Jehovah ; and he notes this difference, that the first name is in the first person as this term is used in gram- mar, it reveals God himself speaking, and is a name com- municated from God to man ; but the other name has not this stamp of the person speaking on it, and in its first utterance it may have been either, like the first, a name communicated from God and revealed to man, or a Divine name having its origin with man. The third name is Jah. Here is the Divine Trinity as expounded by Aben Ezra. A brilliant trinitarian motto stands thus at the head of my letter. Vain is the search for any such Trinitarianism as this in heathenism. It is rather the Trinity of the serpent that becomes prominent in heathenism. In the eleventh book of the Iliad, near the beginning, there is a bril- liant description of the armor of Agamemnon. His shield was on him, suspended from a silver belt, and on this belt a winding serpent displayed its whole length; it had one body, and one neck, but this neck supported three heads, and these heads were looking around in all direc- tions, with the sharpest vision. This probably had the meaning that the serpent knew all things past, and all things present, and all things future. The highest honor that could be given to the serpent consisted in presenting it to the gaze and wonder of the world in this three- headed form. If the triune conception of the eternal 88 THE TRINITARIAN RELATIONS God could be transferred to the serpent, this was the most blasphemous form of the serpent's deification ; and this animal indeed holds a seat of unapproachable dignity in heathen worship. The idea that the serpent excels in wisdom can be traced back to the first man and woman. The first apostasy of man from God was con- nected with the idea that the serpent was man's best counselor, or that the oracles of the serpent were of more value to man than the word of God. The Jews sometimes made themselves similar to the heathen in giving holy honor to the serpent \ and through many centuries, even when the throne of David was most re- splendent and the people had such prophets as Isaiah for their spiritual guides, they still continued to burn incense to the brazen serpent which Moses had prepared and elevated for them in the wilderness. The most famous oracle of Greece was the oracle of the Python, at Delphi, — that is, the oracle of the serpent ; and in its time it dazzled the best-educated intellects of the heathen world. The vestal virgins enjoyed the highest honors that Rome could give ; consuls and prretors had to give way to them on the streets ; the holy serpent was committed to their charge, and they kept its table supplied with meat. Shall I place before your eyes the gods of Greece, — Jupiter, the cloud-gathering Thunderer, the father of gods and men, the wonderful counselor, to whose nod all things in heaven and on earth are perfectly and instantly obedient, and his father Kronos, and Uranos the father of Kronos, and the other deities, Neptune, Pluto, Apollo, and Mercury, the goddesses also, Juno, Athena, Demeter? But there is no need to run through the long list : the truth is instantly transparent that no three can be selected from these which will bear to be placed in any kind of comparison with the Trinity which is taught in the OF FAITH, HOPE, AND LOVE. 89 Bible. Or shall I bring before you the more distant and ancient Egypt, with the three orders of deities, the first order as worshiped by the priests, the third and lowest order as worshiped by the people, and the second order as being intermediate, — there being eight gods in the highest order, twelve in the second, and seven in the third, with Ammon or the concealed god standing first in the highest order, and Typhon the Egyptian god of destruction standing first in the lowest order, until in the age of Moses his name began to be chiseled out from this post of dignity on the monuments? Here again no kind of resemblance is found to the Trinity that re- veals itself from the tetragrammaton. Or shall I bring still more distant objects under your eye, the Hindoo Trimurti, consisting of Brahma the Creator, Vishnu the preserver, and Siva the destroyer ? This subject may be dismissed with the single remark that the whole Hindoo system is essentially pantheism. Therefore I come back to the Trinity which Aben Ezra has pointed out as appearing on the face of the tetra- grammaton ; and I will now show the connection of Jah with faith, the connection of Ehyeh asher Ehyeh with hope, and the connection of Jehovah, in its specific limitation, with love. The special connection of Jah is with faith. Most clearly does the prophet Isaiah bring out this connection in the verse (xxvi. 4), "Trust in Jehovah forever, for in Jah Jehovah is the rock of ages." In Jah Jehovah, in the Jah who is Jehovah, or in the Jah who has come out to view from that more ancient patriarchal term Jehovah, is the rock of ages, or the rock of worlds, or, as the English version gives it, "everlasting strength." The rock of mighty ages, the rock of all time, lies in the word Jah. The original, eternal, and unlimited Godhead lies 8* 90 THE TRINITARIAN RELATIONS in the word Jah, and all true religious faith has its feet resting on this rock, which never can be moved and never can be measured. All the strength, immutability, eter- nity, righteousness, holiness, and truth of God are in the word Jah. The original fountain of all life through all worlds is in this word. The faith of Israel stands on a strong foundation. This name is invested with all its peculiar and mighty meaning in the very first verse of the Bible where it ap- pears. It first appears in the beginning of the song of Moses at the Red Sea: " My strength and song is Jah." (Ex. XV. 2.) All its subsequent use has this verse as its foundation. Strength lodges in the word ; and when faith says. My strength is Jah, it is the same as saying, That cause that is without a cause, the Father that is first of all, that boundless flame of eternal life to which all the stars and all created worlds belong as the little sparks that have been sent out from it, the omnipotence, the immutability, the eternity, the independence, the essence of God, — this, yea, all this is the strong rock on which I stand and in which I trust. In the verse last quoted, strength and song show a close and beautiful connection. The worship of God by the song is the outward ex- pression of faith ; and hence the faith which says, My strength is Jah, says at the same moment. My song is Jah. The strength which supports the feet of faith as a foundation is also the theme of the Divine song on the tongue of faith. Let the temple which will be built when these tribes become settled in the promised land be dedicated to the worship of Jah. Let its highest praise, the sound of which shall go forth as an illumina- tion to all the dark places of the earth, be the praise of Jah, the sublime Hallelu Jah. This name occurred so frequently in the psalms which OF FAITH, HOPE, AND LOVE. 91 were used in the resounding worship of the temple, that the temple became impressed on the minds and memories of the people as being the house of Jah ; and hence the good Hezekiah, when he was nigh to death and all hope of making another visit to the courts of the temple appeared to be cut off, made it his bitter complaint that he could not again go to see Jah, — that he should never again see Jah in the land of the living. It was especially commanded that the word Jah should resound in the sublime songs of adoration. A psalm contained the in- junction, " Extol him that rideth upon the heavens by his name Jah." (Ps. Ixviii. 4.)* The most impressive prominence is given to the w5rd in the closing psalms. The hundred and forty-sixth Psalm has for its first word Praise Jah,. and for its last word the same Praise Jah. The hundred and forty-seventh Psalm has Praise Jah for its beginning, and the same for its last word. And so of all the following psalms to the end of the book, — the ■■•' The following is a translation of the commentary of Rashi on the verse, " Extol him that rideth upon the heavens by Jah his name :" — "By yah his name. That is, by the name Jah, which is the language of fear, as they have translated it in Chaldee by fear, in the verses, ^[y strength and song is yah ; and likewise, For the hand being laid on the throne of yah, in the Targum. Likewise in the phrase ///. yak yehovah ; that so ye will be redeemed by the word of the fear of the Lord and the strength of the world. Says the Psalmist, Sing praises in his presence, and fear before him, and rejoice : and this is an illustration of him saying in another place. And rejoice with tremblifig, Ps. ii. 11." This extract from Rashi, the best rabbi from whom to learn the ancient tradition, supplies strong evidence that Jah was the object of fear in the oldest rabbinic theology, just as the Father is, in his place in the Christian Trinity as the first person, the reconciler being the Son, the second person. The Targum of Isaiah xxvi. 4, which Rashi here cites, appears to read, " Rely upon the word (memt-a) of Jehovah forever, and for ever and ever ; that so ye will be redeemed by the word of the fear of Jehovah the mighty one of ages." 92 THE TRINITARIAN RELATIONS hundred and forty-eighth, the hundred and forty-ninth, and the hundred and fiftieth : each one opens with Praise Jah and closes with Praise Jah. He is here praised because the confidence that is placed in him will not be disap- pointed, while the sons of men are as weak and uncertain as that soft breath which death will soon take from them. He assists the needy, he delivers the oppressed, he ex- tends his mercy to the children of sorrow. All Israel must praise Jah ; the temple must ring with his high praises. All nature must become one stupendous temple resound- ing with his praise. The heavens, the heaven of heavens, the angels, the stars, the sun and moon, the clouds, the vapors, the floods, the snow, the stormy wind, the moun- tains, the seas, the dragons, the kings, the princes, the cities, the chosen people, the people of all lands and seas, must unite all their voices in this holy adoration. At the close, all instruments of music assist in the ecstatic and boundless worship. The high firmament sings to its Cre- ator, and the earth pours forth all its voices; the trumpet the psaltery and harp, the timbrel that gives the charm to the dance, the stringed instruments, the organs, the loud cymbals, the high-sounding cymbals, all are here assisting with their best voices in that most stupendous flourish with which the Psalms make their exit. The combined sound of all these instruments makes the close of the Psalms like the vast and beautiful lake where it pours forth all its waters at the cataract amid the thunders of Niagara. But all these thunders come from the inspiration of the name Jah ; and no star has any light except as it pours forth its music in the adoration of Jah. With this explanation, then, that sirefigth stands for the strong foundation on which faith plants its foot, and that Ihe song stands for the worship which is properly the out- Avard expression or voice of faith, or the psalm or song OF FAITH, HOPE, AXD LOVE. 93 that gave the temple its inner beauty, how wonderfully- prophetic do the words prove to be that were uttered at the Red Sea, " My strength and song is Jah !" The special connection of the Divine name Ehyeh asher Ehyeh (I-will-be-that-I-will-be) is with hope. This adorable name is so clearly of the future tense in all its structure, and it was so manifestly used in the peculiar meaning of the future tense when it was first communi- cated to Moses, that no further argument is needed to show that our hope, which is essentially a prospective emotion, is associated with it. It now comes in order to determine, or try to deter- mine, what place the Lord of hosts, the Beloved, fills in the Trinity of the tetragrammaton. When Ehyeh asher Ehyeh has risen separately in the beginning of the ancient patriarchal Jehovah, and Jah has risen separately in its last letters, there still remains an element in the centre that does not go into either of these two names, but con- tinues untouched between them. This is the present tense, between the future tense at the beginning and the past tense in the last letters. This element holds its seat in the long sound of the vowel u It was made one of the most strict laws that no blood should be used as food. Reli- gion furnished the ground for this law. The blood was appointed to be given to the Lord rjn the altar for the atonement of sin : hence it could never come to the table for food. The atonement was made by the destruction * Antiquities, book iii. chap. viii. 3. f Tholuck refers to the finding of an ancient inscription (die Massi- lische Inschrift), which Movers has investigated in his handling of the sacri- fices of the Carthaginians, as showing that the patriarchal burnt-offering >■ 173, the Mosaic peace-offering 3 ^t:*, with the offerings of oil and food, were known to the Canaanite tribes, the heathen neighbors of the Hebrews. Homer proves that the same kinds of animals were offered in sacrifice among the Greeks and Trojans as among the Jews. Achilles suggested during the pestilence that if the savor of perfect lambs and goats were offered to the angry Apollo, he might become willing to ward off de- struction from them. Therefore a better theory of the Hebrew sacrifices is called for than this one, that the Jews sacrificed the animals which the heathen worshiped as their deities and that other kinds of animals were sacrificed by the heathen from those sacrificed by the Jews. 1 64 THE EPISTLE TO THE HEBREWS of a life for the salvation of a life. The life was in the blood, and the blood, as being the life, was appointed to be carried into the holy of holies on the day of atone- ment, and to be poured out at the altar; and hence it had a holy character, and man was not permitted to use it. When the intelligent Israelite of the present day goes through all the services of the great day of atonement, — the tenth day of the seventh month, — when he has read the whole volume of prayers and kept the rigid fast through the prescribed time, what assurance has he that the whole has been any true atonement for his sins, or that God will accept it as such? The whole service has been without one drop of that blood which the law re- quires ; and the law declares most explicitly that it "is the blood that maketh an atonement for the soul" (Lev. xvii. ii). Does my friend suggest that repentance, fast- ing, and prayer now make the atonement ? But this di- rectly contradicts the law, which says that it is the shed blood which makes the atonement. These never made the atonement in the time of Moses and the prophets : how can they be sufficient to make the atonement now? Will my friend argue that the tears of true repentance are more acceptable to God than the blood of bulls and of goats on the altar? But the tears of true repentance were just as acceptable to God in ancient Israel as they are now ; yet they were never accepted for the atonement then, and can they be accepted now? Will he tell me that God is very merciful, and that in his mercy he will accept repent- ance and prayer for the atonement ? But he had the same mercy thousands of years ago ; and if he never then accepted a day of atonement in Israel without blood, will he now accept it ? Is it answered that sin doubtless required repentance, fasting, and prayer, with an atone- ment in blood, at that time, but that a less atonement will THE EXPONENT OF ANCIENT JUDAISM. 165 cancel it now ? But sin is just as wrong and hateful before God now as ever it was; and if only blood could cover it then, where is any less atonement prescribed to cover it now? The answer again returns that God is all-merciful and we can trust in his mercy, that he has no delight in blood, and that he does not require blood to appease his anger or hide sin from his view. Such an answer is consistent only as coming from heathen lips; neither Jew nor Chris- tian can consistently take any such ground. The heathen can consistently declare that they possess no written law which has come directly from God and which requires bloody sacrifices as an atonement ; and a heathen or in- fidel philosophy very naturally runs to the conclusion that all such sacrifices have their whole origin in the super- stitious and guilty imaginations of the world. The Jew dare not take any such ground*, because he possesses- a voluminous written law, in which he trusts as having come directly from God, and which in innumerable ways demands blood for the atonement of sin. The Christian is, if possible, still more completely cut off from all such views, because the gospel teaches him to trust in the blood of Jesus as the only complete and effectual atonement for sin. The heathen idolater, there- fore, is the man who of all men on the earth can most consistently declare that he has never found any solid foundation in the holy will of God for the theory of the need of atonements by blood. When Moses proclaimed in Egypt that there should be the sprinkling of blood at the doors of all the houses of Israel to save the first-born from death, it was only the infidel who doubted whether that blood was the ordinance of God for such a salva- tion ; and it was the infidel who could then argue that to keep themselves within closed doors without any such 1 66 THE EPISTLE TO THE HEBREWS, ETC. sprinkling of blood would make them sufficiently safe, and that God did not delight in blood, and could save them as well without it if he pleased. If the people of Israel now stand on the ground that all sacrifices were to be brought to the altar at Jerusalem, and that the law would be broken by any sacrifices in any other place, and if the great day of annual atonement now passes among them without any blood of the bullock and the goat which the law required to be sprinkled in the holy of holies and on the altar, because they are not in Jerusalem, it only proves how true are the words of Rashi, the princely Jewish commentator, as they are found in his notes on the seventeenth chapter of Genesis, the eighth verse, that "the son of Israel dwelling outside of the holy land is as if he has no God." M. R. M. LETTER IX. Honored Rabbi : — Let me now lay before you a general review of the fore- going arguments. The first argument was that the holy name Adonai is properly a noun of the plural number, meaning My Lords ; that it commences in the Bible with Abraham, and that as Abraham and Lot used it several times in the last twenty-four hours of the duration of Sodom, it stood for One Eternal Jehovah, and its plurality stood for the three persons through whom this Eternal One was then revealed : its plurality is also very manifest in the use of it as a secular term once by Lot at the same time. The second argument was that the four-lettered adora- ble and ineffable name has two combinations of Three in it: first, with the patriarchs it was He-who-will-be, He- who-is-now , and He-who-was ; and secondly, with Moses, who exceeded all preceding prophets, it first separated itself into three distinct names, the Jah, the I-will-be- that-Lwill-be, and the new Jehovah which had not been known to the patriarchs ; that these three names are equally proper nouns standing for the Eternal One, and they are equally designations, not of any one of his attri- butes, not of any combination of his attributes, and not of any of his wonderful works, like the term Creator, but of his eternal essence, his innermost unity, and that they are equally holy, glorious, and incomprehensible ; and the 1 68 GENERAL REVIEW, same three names become in the New Testament the Father, the Holy Ghost, and the Son of God in the centre. The third argument can be illustrated by the first verse in the Epistle of James: — "James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ, to the twelve tribes which are scattered abroad, greeting;" in which verse the term Kurios (Lord) might with the highest propriety have been joined to the first Divine name, which is God, but it is actually joined to Jesus Christ, and thus it is. proved to be as much an appellative as a proper name ; and the Hebrew tetragrammatic ineffable name of which it is the uniform translation is conceded by the ablest rabbinic scholars, and proved by the laws of Hebrew grammar, to be stamped with this same appellative character, this same character of a common noun, while it still remains the essential, exclusive, incommunicable, and supremely holy Divine name. Its appellative character is utterly irreconcilable with the view that genuine Judaism is unitarian. This verse cited from James presents Jesus as the Kurios; but there is another verse where clearly another person is the Kurios: "At that time Jesus an- swered and said, I thank thee, O Father, Lord oi heaven and earth." (Matt.xi. 25.) Now, let this same appellative character be identified in the term Jehovah Sabaoth, Jehovah of hosts, this same susceptibility of an applica- tion to two persons, — and it must have this to be an appellative, — and then good-night to Unitarianism. It must leave the inside of the Bible : do shut the door on it.* The fourth argument was that as the Lord proclaimed * Notice particularly the note subjoined at the middle of my second letter, and containing the quotation from Aben Ezra on the tetragram- maton as being both a nonien proprium and an appellative, a Dxyn d::' and "iNH DC. WITH HANDLING OF OBJECTIONS. 169 his name to Moses at Horeb, after the worship of the golden calf, as htmg Jehovah Jehovah, so the Son of God has a glory in the New Testament similar to the glory of the second name, as it comes after the first : he is the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth; and the miracle of his resurrection from the dead cannot be gainsaid with any show of reasonable argument, and it of itself sufficiently proves that he was the Son of God, as he had so often said. The fifth argument was that the Divine names, having no appearance of plurality, current among the patriarchs, such as iT/and El Ely on (God most high), and Shaddai and El Shaddai a.Vid Eloah, received no special honor from Moses, but he almost banished them from his own theo- logical vocabulary, and he filled their place with other names most clearly of the plural number, such as Elohim diwd Ado?iai ax\6. Adom'tn, and the four-lettered namey^- hovah, developing itself into three new cognate names and carrying all its original and essential glory out into each one of them ; and this change of Divine names proves that the Mosaic theology was an advance from the earlier patriarchal, in the direction of the Christian Trinity, and that it occupies an intermediate stage of development be- tween the two ; and it most clearly proves that it could not have been the chief object of Moses to establish a simple Unitarianism as the creed of Judaism. The sixth argument was that the theological watchword, "Hear, O Israel : Jehovah our Elohim is one Jehovah" (Deut. vi. 4), rises to a vastly higher sublimity if full justice be done to the plurality in Adonai, the plurality in Elohim, and the wonderful plurality which in the age of Moses became clearly manifested in this four-lettered name ; that thus the watchword becomes the impress of unity on diversity, whereas according to the unitarian lyo GENERAL REVIEW, interpretation it is the impress of unity on unity and becomes almost a vacant saying. The argument is that tliis text will be infinitely more glorious in heaven than ever it has appeared to be on earth ; that there is a world of Divine truth in it, which needs all the light of heaven and of eternity to bring it out fully into view ; and that its chief value is its internal treasure of truth, whereas Unitarians find almost no value in it except as an external protection, and the Unitarianism of the Jews makes it a mere wall of-defense at the outside, to shut out false gods and idols from the holy soil of Judaism ; so that when all idolatry is banished from the earth the old wall will hardly be needed anymore. The Trinitarian beholds this text rising in higher and still higher glory, as expressive of the internal relations of the Supreme Being, when the last idol of the earth shall have been laid in its grave a thousand years. The seventh argument was that the prophet Zechariah speaks of the Lord who should bring forth his servant the Branch and should engrave the seven eyes on the stone; and of the Holy Spirit, — "Not by might, nor by power, but by my spirit, saith the Lord of hosts ;" and if this stone, engraved with the seven eyes which are the seven eyes of the Lord running to and fro through the whole earth, is the Messiah, then the Three are brought out to view,- the Father, the Holy Ghost, and the Son. The eighth argument was that Ezekiel, in his three chap- ters from the thirty-seventh to the thirty-ninth inclusive, speaks of the Lord and the Lord's servant David, who, it is there predicted, will be shepherd and prince over Israel forever; and he closes with the mention of the Spirit: " Neither will I hide my face any more from them ; for I have poured out my spirit upon the house of Israel, saith the Lord of hosts ;" and these same three appear in WITH HANDLING OF OBJECTIONS. 171 the New Testament as the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. The ninth argument was that the book of Isaiah has the Lord from eternity, and the Branch from Jesse's root, and the Spirit of the Lord resting on this Branch ; and these same three are, in the New Testament, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. The tenth argument was that Christianity certainly repels Unitarianism, and the ancient Judaism pierces it with many inextricable and fatal thorns; but there is no doubt that it is the essential doctrine of Mohammedanism and the Koran ; it has there its undisputed lodging, its safest home; and this itself is an unanswerable argument against it, because the truth that was to carry Divine bless- ings over all the world was not to come from Abraham through Ishmael, but through Isaac ; and Jesus is the son of Isaac. The eleventh argument was that the most searching glass fails to discover any pure Trinitarianism in the mythology of Greece, Egypt, or India; that it appears to have its best show there in the dragon, the neck of which supported three heads ; but in the faith of Jews and Christians it is the good tree planted over the bones of the serpent, which brings forth its fruit in faith, hope, and love, for the spiritual life of all the world. The twelfth argument was chiefly confined to the first chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews : it consisted for the most part of proofs that the Messiah, as the Son of God and as the anointed Elohim, has names given him in the Jewish Scriptures higher than any names that can be found among the angels ; that the four quotations relating to the Messiah, from the Old Testament, in this chapter, are according to the Hebrew, and are taken from the Septuagint ; and that all the seven quotations from the 172 GENERAL REVIEW, Old Bible in this chapter are transferred from the Septiia- gint, and the chapter appears to have been designed especially for the eyes of Alexandrian Jews ; that no quoted sentence is distorted, and that the doctrine of the Trinity lies in the epistle. The thirteenth argument was that the Epistle to the Hebrews came into existence in the last hour of the sacri- ficial service at the altar and the temple, and deserves to be accepted as the true exponent of the ancient Judaism ; that no other theory gives the Jewish ritual such a sublime meaning and invests its memory with such a holy value for all generations to the end of the world ; and that if it' is the authoritative and final exponent of ancient Judaism, and it teaches both that the Messiah is the Son of God in the highest sense, and the doctrine of the Trinity, it follows that Unitariahism, as opposed to Trinitarianism, must be a principle of heathenism rather than of that specific Judaism which unfolds itself in this epistle. The fourteenth argument will appear in my tenth letter, which will be the next after this. I now proceed to the consideration of various weighty objections. I have searched carefully for them through your six letters addressed to me. Confident expectation fixed its eyes on you, as you were known to be a distin- guished Hebraist and an accomplished German scholar, for an excellent defense of Unitarianism. Some objections which I expected you to make very prominent you have entirely omitted. You make a confession in your sixth and last letter, which I must praise for its truth and candor. Your words are these: " I owe you yet a great deal ; for I liave only commenced to refute your first article, and have only touched the first point of your second." My reply is that your progress has been slow. It was well to tell the truth ; but then it would have been a little more of WITH HANDLING OF OBJECTIONS. 173 the truth if you had acknowledged that you did not find one thing to weaken, in any way, the argument in my first letter. I suppose that of all my arguments the weakest was this first one, — the one founded on the name Adonai; but you never dared to say that this name in the eighteenth chapter of Genesis is not of the plural number and does not there stand for three persons. You have not once touched the essential point which I brought out so prominently, that it is not a tenable theory that the plurality of the word in that chapter arises from the mixture of two created persons with the Creator him- self. How you would walk through the whole length of my second letter, — how you would handle the manifest fact that Kurios, or Lord, as a Divine name, is an appel- lative or common noun in the New Testament, being applied to both God and Jesus Christ, and the other fact so overwhelming to the unitarian cause, that the ineffable, most holy name has, with all the same clearness, passed into an appellative, — are two questions which I am not able to answer, because I have not seen you make the attempt. The ablest argumentation which you have brought against me on any point is that in the phrase Elohim Kedoshim (holy God), which joins an adjective in the plural with Elohim, thus proving that the last is also plural, it is the simple plural of majesty, — a good argument on your side ; but I hope you will see that it can be answered. Only have a little patience with me. You give particular and protracted attention to the line of the poet, — " A virgin shall conceive, a virgin bear a son :" but Jesus as the Son of God in the Trinity is the subject chosen for our discussion, and the son of a virgin belongs to another subject. I prefer not to mix our examination of Trinitarianism with another subject. The most rigid 15* 174 GENERAL REVIEW, Unitarian might believe that the birth of Jesus was con- nected with a miracle, just as all Jews believe that the origin of Adam was in a miracle. Some Unitarians now retain the miraculous conception in their creed ; and it is stated that "it is one of the last articles which Dr. Priestley has curtailed from his scanty creed." I aim now to have your work done better than you have left it, in presenting a list of the most forcible objec- tions to the Trinitarian doctrine. The first objection is that the plurality in all the names for the Supreme Being, as Eloliim, Adonai, Adouim, Cre- ator, or, more literally, Creators (Eccles. xii. i), Makers (Isa. liv. 5), Holy Ones (Josh. xxiv. 19), Gods of gods (Ps. cxxxvi. 2), and Lords of lords (Deut. x. 17), must be explained on the simple theory oi i\\Q plural of majesty. That there is a plural of majesty is not disputed ; but that this explains the plurality in the names of the Cre- ator is the point which can be called in question. Divine names of the singular number, such as Eloah and Shaddal, occur much more frequently in the poetry of the Bible than in the prose. Thus, the word Eloah occurs only twice in all the Pentateuch, and both these instances are in the excellent song which Moses composed at the close of his life and left to be impressed on the memory of the people in all ages. Poetry is eminently the language of majesty ; and if these are plurals of majesty they ought to be found glowing beautifully through the poetry of the Bible, rather than in its plain history ; but just the oppo- site is the fact: these plurals abound in the plain history, while the Divine names of the singular number are found more generally in the majestic poetry. Observe, further, that Moses found the names of the singular number very current and most sacred among his fathers the patriarchs; and can it be admitted that he re- WITH HANDLING OF OBJECTIONS. 175 jected them and filled their place with plural names from a regard to majesty ? It is always better that language express truth than that it glitter with majesty. If Moses saw a great truth in these plural names, there was a good reason why he should make the change and give them such overshadowing prominence in the Bible ; but if he introduced them only for their majesty, the change cannot be too severely censured. If his great object was to estab- lish the simple doctrine of Unitarianism for all ages, he ought to have repelled the majesty of any Divine plurality with abhorrence. He ought never to have set the fasci- nating majesty of polytheism and idolatry before the eyes of his people. It is a detestable theory that he wished to have majesty, and for this reason designated the one true God uniformly by names literally signifying more than one. This would be to declar* that he found the unity of God, as held by the patriarchs, soantiquated and so destitute of beauty that he had to borrow paint from the altars of idols to give it a coating of true majesty and beauty. This would be to assert that all through the Bible, and especially in its historical and prose parts, it is the paint borrowed from the manufacturing houses of poly- theism that sets that peculiar majesty on the God of Israel. Moses certainly would not use language that was really one of the worst lies of idolatry, merely because there was a glitter of majesty in it. Especially ought every Israelite to abhor the first intimation of this kind concerning Moses. The second objection is that our philosophy cannot touch the mystery of the Trinity, that it never has been explained how the Three can be One and the One can be Three, and never can be explained ; that the whole sub- ject exists in the best-educated minds as a kind of poly- theistic mist; that reason is bewildered, and the mystery is too inexplicable and self-contradicting to be credible. 176 GENERAL REVIEW, That day when Abraham reached Mount Moriah, bound his beloved son of about twelve years of age on the aUar, and raised his hand armed with a knife to take the life of his son, settled the point for all future ages that man's reason is not supreme in the Jewish religion, but that reve- lation is supreme. Reason would have told Abraham on that day that he was making himself a murderer, that he was bringing a most horrible stain on his character which could never be washed out ; but the Lord had told him to do it, and it was supernatural revelation that guided him, not his own reason. It is high presumption in reason to claim to be per- mitted to walk with open eyes around the glorious throne of the Almighty. There is that mild light in the lower sphere of all created things, in which reason has the right to walk, and which furnishes infinite enjoyment to her open eyes; but she cannot ascend into the higher sphere . of the eternal Creator except to be dazzled and compelled to draw the veil over her eyes. Cold reason is not the highest faculty of the human soul : some faculties con- nected with the heart hold a much higher place, and these highest faculties display their supremacy and excellent beauty in the sphere of religion. The eternal throne does not call us up to see all things and understand them ; higher privileges are there than the privileges of sight, higher enjoyments are there than the enjoyments of clear intellectual vision : the cloud of mystery and glory is always resting over that throne ; and that is the place for wonder, for amazement, for the celestial song, for the rapturous Hallelu Jah, for the veiling of all eyes before the dazzling glory, for the prostration in the dust, and for the casting of the crowns at the feet of Him who sit- teth on the throne. Religion is the sphere of holy wor- ship; but reason is not the worshiping faculty in the soul ; WITH HANDLING OF OBJECriONS. 177 it belongs rather to a lower grade. Unapproachable majesty reigns in heavenly things ; and if majesty and religion require names of the plural number for God, it is certain that truth also requires them, and reason has no right to interpose the objection of mystery : she ought to know her lower place among the faculties. One may have this conception of God's unity, that he is the central point of all worlds, somewhat as we con- ceive of the centre of gravity in the single world ; that all material magnitude and intellectual power and moral worth throughout all worlds have their perfect centre in him, so that all created things are in concentric circles around him and all things are an outgrowth from him. He would then be a unit in the same sense that a mere central point is a perfect unit, and he would exist in no relations except those which he holds to the objects and beings around him ; all internal relations would be seen at once to be an impossibility. If the unity of God is committed to the unassisted teaching of human reason, this is probably the best conception of it, and it seems as if it ouglit to be the genuine unitarian conception. Cold reason might teach such a doctrine as this; but the glow- ing poetry of heathenism could not confine the Deity to that centre where all material and moral laws come together in one point-; it dispersed the Divine essence through the universe, so that one god was enthroned in the woods, another presided over a river, and another held his seat in the sun. Such heathen poetry has really more religion in it than the conception of the unity of God as identified with that universal centre in which lies the balance of all worlds. The Bible teaches an essen- tially different doctrine. It does not point to God in the centre of all created things ; it raises his glory above all the heavens, so that all the constellations of the night H* 178 GENERAL REVIEW, make only the beautiful gem in the ring which he carries on his finger. If this is the right view of the eternal essence as having its sphere infinitely above the sphere of all created things, it is not contrary to reason to conceive of it as having a life separate from all created things and independent of them, as having internal actions and com- munications, or rather as having different centres of inter- nal relations: these centres of internal relations may be three, and the best names which we can have for them may be the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. The third objection is that the Trinity has no analogy in universal nature. This may be asserted with truth, but it is not true in every aspect. The thing cannot be found in nature which has a substantial existence and which exists as a simple unit without any combination. One of the first lessons in natural science is that matter exists in three essential dimensions, — length, breadth, and thickness. No particle of matter can enter our conceptions so small that it does not possess a length, a breadth, and a thickness. Our earth has the same dimensions, — a longitude, a latitude, and a diameter. The sun could not be a shining globe without a longitude, a latitude, and a diameter. Every star that blazes in the universe has the same three dimen- sions. That fixed star may appear to the most powerful telescope as being a single luminous point without any visible extent ; but astronomy teaches that it must have a length, a breadth, and a thickness. A star might be known through many ages as only a single luminous point, but an advance of astronomy might come, bringing its length, its breadth, and, its thickness into actual measurement ; and so the unity of God might be the doctrine through many long ages, and the Trinity might first come to view in the higher developments of theology. The whole ere- WITH HA XD LING OF OBJECTIONS.. 179 ated universe is known to us in three aspects : first, as ex- tending out through space, so that there are objects more near and more distant ; secondly, as advancing forward in time, so that there was the world of yesterday and the world of the day before yesterday; and, thirdly, as rising up in dignity, so that there are many orders of beings, ascending up to the highest rank of angels. One prophet speaks of a stone which the Lord himself engraves, and thus seven eyes are cut in it which are the seven eyes of the Lord running to and fro through the whole earth. Imagine that this stone is perfectly circular, and that the seven eyes are cut in its circumference at equal distances from one another, and then all the seven eyes might stand in exactly the same relations to the whole body of the stone. Each e.ye might be called a centre of internal relations; and all the seven, standing in exactly the same relations to the whole stone, might help to illustrate what might be the meaning of different centres of internal relations in the eternal Godhead. Man himself has in one sense three natures, he has three lives: first, he has a life giving him a physical growth and having its centre in his blood, which would place him among vegetables if he had no higher nature ; secondly, he has an animal life, having its centre in the brain, which would give him his rank down among ani- mals if he had no higher life ; and, thirdly, he has a moral and immortal life, or a higher nature, in which he knows and worships God, and which gives him a brother- hood among the angels. The mysteries of the combina- tion of these three lives in one person are inexplicable. And shall he whose own nature entangles his reason in impenetrable mysteries claim that the God in whom he believes must have a nature and a personality which he can understand ? l8o GENERAL REVIEW, These are presented as illustrations how all things that exist in nature present combinations; but no one of them must be considered as a proper illustration of the adorable Trinity. All things in nature lead into great mistakes, if a close likeness to the Trinity be sought in any one. The fourth objection is that the whole controversy is settled in the verse (Zech. xiv. 9), "And Jehovah shall be king over all the earth : in that day shall there be one Jehovah, and his name one." But if the whole of this chapter be examined, it may be found that it is not the most inviting chapter for those who are collecting argu- ments for the support of Unitarianism. This same king is afterwards mentioned in the same chapter as being Je- hovah's King ; at least so Aben Ezra interprets the verse, "And it shall come to pass that every one that is left of all the nations which came against Jerusalem shall even go up from year to year to worship the King, the Jehovah of hosts." Aben Ezra pronounces this an incorrect ver- sion, and he sees in the Masoretic pointing the proof that the word king is here in the construct state, as gramma- rians say ; so that it must be read, to worship the King of Jehovah of hosts, that is, the Messiah as the king whom Jehovah has appointed. The king of all the earth will, accordingly, have two names in that day, because this chapter here gives him two names : he will be called Jehovah, and he will be called Jehovah's King. Jehovah will be king over all the earth, and all nations will go up to Jerusalem to worship the King of Jehovah. If the question here must be met how this king, who is, as Aben Ezra takes it, the Messiah, can be both Jehovah and Jehovah's King, it involves nearly all the difficulties of the other question. How can Jesus be called both God and God's Son ? Such chapters are not very safe places for unitarian controversialists. WITH HANDLING OF OBJECTIONS. i8l But we must take the verse by itself, and find what Unitarians can fairly make out of it. In that day Jehovah will be one, and his name one; and Unitarians understand it that then no Divine Trinity will be acknowledged, but that the unitarian creed of the unity will be universally accepted. This prophecy assures the Jew that his simple view of the Divine unity will prevail through all the world m the end, and his present prejudice against the Trinity will then be justified. If God will finally be known among all nations by one name, it is an interesting ques- tion, What will that name be ? The common answer among the Jews is, it will be the four-lettered name Jehovah. But this name must carry with it the other two names, equally essential, equally glorious, and equally perfect with itself, the Jah and the I-will-be-that-I-will-be, the one at its right hand, the other at its left ; and there is no other single name that has such a thorough trinita- rian stamp on it as this name has. The word Trinity itself would fail infinitely from speaking with such power for the truth and mystery of the Trinity as this holy name does. Yes, when Unitarianism becomes the creed of all the world, it would be better that God be known by the name Trinity than by the name Jehovah, because that term, as being of Latin origin, carries no such effulgence of the mystery and likeness of the Trinity as this last name does. Neither of the Divine names which stand at the head of the decalogue, neither y,?/^^^7a/^ nor Elohim, is suitable for an age of universal Unitarianism. The better way would be to go beyond Moses back among the patriarchs, and accept their El, or their Shaddai, or their Eloah, because there is no plurality in either of these names. Or, if it be preferable to march forward from Moses, rather than backward, Unitarianism can be just as well accommodated in the New Testament as among the i6 1 82 GENERAL REVIEW, patriarchs, because both Kurios and Theos are always of the singular number when they are names for God, and they never appear in the plural in Christian literature, except to designate inferior beings, and, generally, false gods or idols. A triumphant unitarianism ought to have the right motto blazi'ng on its flag ; and the Jews propose the motto, " Hear, O Israel !" etc.; but let it be inscribed there in Greek, or in Latin, or in English, — in any other language than the original Hebrew. In English it is. Hear, O Israel : The Lord our God is one Lord ; in Latin, Audi, Israel, Doininus Dens nostcr, Dominus unus est ; and in Greek, as it is found in the New Testament (Mark xii. 29), ^' Axooz, 'Iffparjl, hbpioq 6 Oeck; rj/j.u>v, Jiupcoq elc; itrrt. In these three versions everything completely disappears from it which Trinitarians might use as a support to their creed. Here neither Z^r^, nor Dominus, nor Kurios pre- sents any such picture of Three in One as the word Jeho- vah does. Here the corresponding words God, Dens, and Theos have no such plurality as the holy name Elohim has, but the moment either of them is changed into the plural it becomes blackened with the abominations of idolatry. No one of these versions suggests of itself that the motto is really another Epiurihus unuin, — out of more, one — with three persons, one essence — more in one, and one in more; and there is possibly no language except the Hebrew that can set both the plurality and the unity in this motto, and suggest that it is really another E plu- ribus unum, the plurality indicating the need that it be followed by the unity, and the unity at the end being the stamp covering the plurality. The motto may go on the flag of unitarianism in either of these languages; but the Hebrew will not suit. The Greek translation, as it is found in the New Testament, will suit admirably; but the Hebrew appears to be protesting that it was made to be spoken by a trinitarian people. WITH HANDLING OF OBJECTIONS. 183 Here another suggestion comes in, that in that day when the Lord will be one, and his name one, the name may be neither the tetragrammatic name, nor Elohim, nor any peculiarly patriarchal name for God, but it maybe a new name ; and, while it is new, -it may have a wonderful similarity to some old name. The prophets predicted the time when the Lord would call his people by a new name.* Matthew has one verse which has given commentators a vast amount of trouble; it is in his account of Jesus as follows: "He came and dwelt in a city called Naza- reth : that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophets, He shall be called a Nazarene." The Jews have always given Jesus the distinction of the Nazarene, or, to conform more closely to the Hebrew, the Notscri. Every student of the Talmud knows how common it is in rabbinical literature to connect Notseri with the name of Jesus. f The difficulty is to find any prophet that has ever used the term Notseri, or has applied it either to the Lord or to the Messiah. The list of names which was given to Moses at Horeb after the worship of the golden calf again comes to our mind, and we may search through it for the particular name which will be most suitable for that future day when all men shall know the Lord. At- tend now to the list as we pass over it : " And he called (proclaimed), Jehovah, Jehovah, El, merciful and gra- cious, long-suffering, and abundant in goodness and truth, keeping" — here is the very word Notser — " keeping mercy for thousands," the Notser o{ mercy for the thousandth » Isaiah Ixv. 15. f Notice the reference which the Talmud makes to the first day of the week as the Yom Notseri, the day of the Nazarene : 13 NOiSnn 31 con — Abodah Zarah, comment on the second text from the Mishna in the first part. 184 GENERAL REVIEW, generation. This is the old name. Now add to it the smallest letter of the Hebrew alphabet, which is often done with such words, and you set it in a more emphatic form, or you give it the meaning, My Keeper; and, behold, it is now precisely the* new name Notseri. It is now as near to the old name as it can be to be a new name, and it is as near to a new name as it can be to be an old name. It suffers the slightest possible change, to be any change. Now go back and make the slightest possible change in the Masoretic mark under the first letter oi ihQvtrh proclaimed, and the text becomes this: And he shall call — Notseri; he shall be called Notseri ; he shall be called Jehovah, Jehovah, El, merciful and gracious, long-suffering, abun- dant in goodness and truth ; — and, in addition to all these, Notseri, my keeper of mercy to the thousandth generation ; or, with a higher emphasis, the keeper of mercy to the thousandth generation. The Masorites make the first letter of the word Notser here remarkably large ; they make it much larger than any other letter in this list of Divine names, as if it is a remarkable word, as if a new era might open up from it, as if the hopes of the world might hang on it. There need be no hesitation in saying that in that glorious day when the Lord shall be King over all the earth, and when the Lord shall be one, and his name one, there will be no one name for Jehovah more appropriate than this Notseri ; there will be no one name for the universal King the Messiah better than this Notseri ; there will be no new name by which to desig- nate all the converts to the genuine principles of the ancient Judaism more appropriate than this Notseri ; there will be no one name by which to designate the true worshipers of the God of Israel in all lands more appro- priate than this Notseri ; because it will then still mean my keeper of mercy to the thousandth generation, and WITH HANDLING OF OBJECTIONS. 185 the generation will then be present which Abraham saw at a great distance in the future ; and, moreover, it will still be the designation of J&sus the Notseri, the prophet of Nazareth, and of his followers. You make a good choice if you accept Notseri or Nazarene for the name, in that great day when Jehovah shall be one, and his name one. I imagine you smiling, my learned rabbi, a* this speci- men of light argumentation, for I am sure you will call it light and poorly adapted to make any impression on an educated Jew : I will, therefore, briefly dismiss this fourth objection with a more solid suggestion. You will read with me a passage from Paul, in the First Epistle to the Corinthians: "Then cometh the end, when he shall have delivered up the kingdom to God, even the Father; when he shall have put down all rule and all authority and power. For he must reign, till he hath put all enemies under his feet. The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death. For he hath put all things under his feet. But when he saith, all things are put under him, it is manifest that he is excepted, which did put all things under him. And when all things shall be subdued unto him, then shall the Son also himself be subject unto him that put all things under him, that God may be all in all." The text is furnished by Zechariah, and here is the comment- ary from Paul, and there is no depth in the text that is not reached by this commentary ; and both need only to be fully understood to be found entirely consistent. When the publication of our letters in the Israelite closed. Dr. Wise honored us with a brief review, which I am pleased here to reproduce in full. It reads : "In the discussion between Rev. Dr. Guinzburg, of Boston, and M. R. M., on the unity or trinity of the 16* 1 86 GEAEKAL REVIEW, Deity, one important point, it appears to us, has not been touched upon, viz., the New Testament nowhere acknowledges the trinitarian doctrine. Paul, the actual founder of Gentile Christianity, acknowledged, taught, and worshiped the One and Eternal God, who has no similarity and no connection whatever with the Son, who in Paul's system is an angelic or metathronic being, temporarily appointed to a certain mission, viz., to conduct the catastrophe of the dying earth and the subsequent day of judgment. We have proved this proposition in our ' Origin of Christianity,' by passages from the authentic epistles of Paul. John the Evan- gelist, who changed Paul's Son of God into the mys- terious Logos, which sounds like the beginning to the trinitarian doctrine, nevertheless has Jesus himself say, ' And this is life eternal, that they might know thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent' (xvii. 3). Here, according to the testimony of Jesus him- self, he is not the only true God, but is soniebody sent by the only true God. The same idea precisely is expressed in the parallel passages, John iii. 34, v. 19, etc. : the Son is everywhere the subordinate and human messenger of the Father ; nowhere any sign of the trinitarian or dualistic doctrine. If Paul and John were Unitarians, the Synoptics undoubtedly were. "The first question, then, must be. Where is the source of the trinitarian doctrine? If it is not in the New Testa- ment, if even Paul and John did not teach it, what busi- ■ ness has the Protestant Christian to believe it ? Evidently none. If John has Jesus proclaim God as the Afonos Theos, how can a Christian critic attempt to discover anywhere a triune God ? The very research, from the Christian stand-point, is heresy and blasphemy. "Before anybody comes again to us with the trinitarian WITH HANDLING OF OBJECTIONS. 187 doctrine, let him show where in the New Testament that doctrine is taught, and, if he cannot, let him confess it to be a piece of popish theology." Perhaps I should see in this criticism a reproof that I did not state more explicitly that the Westminster Cate- chism opens with the question and answer, "Are there more Gods than one ? There is but one only living and true God." Dr. Wise appears here to give up completely the only ground on which the crucifixion of Jesus has always been justified by the Jews. If Jesus did not call himself the Son of God, and was not for this reason found guilty of blasphemy by the Jews, no reason can be found why he was crucified. He once said to the Jews, " Many good works have I showed you from my Father; for which of those works do ye stone me?" They answered, " For a good work we stone thee not ; but for blasphemy ; and because that thou, being a man, makest thyself God." In his trial, on the morning of his crucifixion, they all said, as we read in Luke, "Art thou then the Son of God ? And he said unto them, Ye say that I am. And they said. What need we any further witness? for we ourselves have heard of his own mouth." The Talmud reports that he was suspended because he practiced sorcery and seduced and misled Israel.* If these are not the reasons for the *A reference to Jesus is in the Talmud (Amsterdam edition) Sanhe- drin, leaf 43, of which the following may pass as a tolerable translation : " Mishna. They (the court) find the accused innocent, and so release him ; but if not, he goes forth to be stoned, and a herald goes before him to proclaim, The person A, the son of Mr. B, goes forth to be stoned because he has committed a certain crime, and the Messrs. C and D are the witnesses. Let any one cognizant of his innocence come forth and prove it for him. " Gemara. Rabbi Abai says. And it is necessary to specify the very day, and the very hour, and the very place : perhaps there are some who know, and they have come conspiring against him. And a herald goes before 1 88 GENERAL REVIEW. crucifixion, it appears strange that there should be. such cruelty without any reason. Dr. Wise has, therefore, the question left with him. Why was Jesus crucified ? M. R. M. him. Indeed ! Not at an earlier time ! And it is delivered down to us, that on the preparation of the passover they suspended Jesus, and a her- ald went before him forty days, (saying) He goes forth to be stoned, on the ground that he practiced sorcery and seduced and misled Israel. Let any one cognizant of his innocence come forth and prove it for him : and they did not find proof of his innocence, and they suspended him' on the preparation of the passover. Gnula says, And can you think of this son of perverseness that his innocence is supposable ? A seducer he was : and the All-merciful says, ' Neither shalt thou spare, neither shalt thou conceal him.* Deut. xiii. 8." The above illustrates how Jesus is, in the Talmud, " as a root out of a dry ground." LET'TER X. My valued Correspondent : — I send this letter to you as the last of the series ; and it may come to you with the characteristic heading, or title, The Spirit of the Lord and his Word, for this reason, that I have chosen the text Isaiah lix. 21, " As for me, this is my covenant with them, saith the Lord 3 My spirit that is upon thee, and my words which I have put in thy mouth, shall not depart out of thy mouth, nor out of the mouth ef thy seed, nor out of the mouth of thy seed's seed, saith the Lord, from henceforth and forever:" this text I have chosen to be the central point of my last letter.* When Apollo, as heathen poets have given the account, took possession of the priestess to make her the medium of his oracles, her whole nature resisted, and she was transferred powerfully into an unnatural state; and her foaming mouth, her frantic eyes, and her terribly throbbing heart, indicated the presence of the god, and the reality of the struggle of her body, mind, and will against him, immediately before the hundred huge doors opened spon- "•■■ Besides this passage from Isaiah, the following references will be found introduced prominently in this letter : Numbers xxiv. 2 ; 1 Sam. xix. 23 ; Ex. xxxi. 3 ; Judges xiv. 6, xv. 14 ; I Kings xviii. 12; 2 Kings ii. 16; Ezek. viii. 3, xi. 5, 24; Matt. iv. i; Isa. Ixiii. 9-14; Numbers xi. 25-29; Micah iii. 8; Zech. vii. 12; Hag. ii. 5; I Sam. xvi. 13; 2 Sam. xxiii. 2 ; Isa. xxxii. 15; Joel ii. 28-31; Mark iii. 29. 189 IQO THE SPIRIT OF THE LORD taneously, and the sound of the response commenced.* No one can doubt that Apollo is here viewed as a sepa- rate spirit subduing the human spirit : he possesses, in all such descriptions, a distinct divine personality. The other point which must be carefully noted here is that the Spirit of God appears in the Bible in the same clear light, invested with a distinct Divine personality. The Holy Ghost had the same struggle with the resisting human spirit, and achieved more wonderful victories. The prophets often passed into a state of actual insanity, or, if it was not this, it bordered very closely on it. The Spirit of God came on Balaam : he fell down and in- stantly lost all strength, but his eyes were open to the vision. He hated Israel in his heart, and he had traveled a long distance under the influence of a most intense de- sire to utter a curse, but he could not do it. His eyes were dazzled with the reward of immense riches and honor, which had been promised to him if he could curse the people; but the Spirit of God held his spirit under perfect control ; his wicked will was overruled, his ava- rice, selfishness, and malignity were defeated, his body fell helpless at his own heathen altars, and the Spirit of God made his tongue the organ of as rich blessings as ever fell on Israel. His four speeches at that time are among the most beautiful specimens of Hebrew poetry, and his pre- dictions of the extermination awaiting Amalek, the deso- lation which should reign at Petra, the capital of Edom, "* " At, Phaebi nondum patiens, immanis in antro Bacchatur vates, magnum si pectore possit Excussisse deum : taiito magis ille fatigat Os rabidum, fera corda domans, fingitque premendo. Ostia jamque domiis patuere ingcntia centum Sponte sua, vatisque ferunt responsa per auras.*' Virgil. AND HIS WORD. 191 through thousands of years, and the immiscibility of the Jews among the nations, are justly classed among the dazzling wonders of the Bible. A similar prodigy occurred in the life of Saul the king. He was pursuing after David to take his life; but when he came near the place where Samuel was standing at the head of the school of the prophets, the persecuting will van- ished from his heart, and he became a prophet. He had sent three sets of messengers to that spot against David ; but the Spirit of God had come on them, and in becom- ing prophets they had become utterly incapable to exe- cute his commission. He himself now followed : the same Spirit overpowered him, and in the presence of Samuel he uttered prophecies and praises. He threw off his garments, and in this strange nakedness he lay there the whole day and the whole night. His mind must have ceased to act through the bodily senses, and all conscious- ness of personal dignity must have left him. Two men are seen lying helpless at the feet of the Spirit of God : one is Balaam, the other is Saul ; and not only are their bodies overpowered, but in each one a wicked will is chained, a wicked purpose is deranged, and their false tongues are compelled to be the organs of celestial music and prophecy : and this all brings the Spirit of God clearly out to view as the superior Divine personal agent. Heathen poets could not tell it in- plainer language, that Apollo was the superior divine spirit or person who took possession of the faculties and senses of the priestess. Ingenuity in the useful arts is one of the blessings shed down on men by the Spirit of God. The Lord said to Moses in relation to a certain workman, "And I have filled him with the spirit of God ;" and what did this "mean? It meant that the model of the whole tabernacle should be distinctly impressed on his mind, and that he should 192 THE SPIRIT OF THE LORD have the ability to finish all the pares according to the Divine design. It meant that the various materials should be brought to his hand, — the gold, silver, brass, wood, and precious stones, the blue, purple, scarlet, fine linen, and goats' hair, — and he should form them into the sanctuary. And all its parts, the mercy-seat, the chest inclosing the decalogue, the cherubim, the table, the candlestick, the gorgeous curtains, the two altars, all the measurements, the garments of the priests, the splendid dress of the high priest, all should correspond perfectly to that design which had been formed in the thoughts of heaven. He should deserve to be called a Divine artificer. The Spirit of God should suggest to him and strengthen him, and in all the work he should be the accomplished instrument in the hand of the Spirit. The strengthening of a man for a wondrous achieve- ment was another gift of the Spirit of the Lord. When the young lion roared against Samson, the Spirit of the Lord came mightily upon him, and the immediate result was that he tore the beast to pieces as if it was only a kid that he had in his hands. Shortly afterwards the Spirit again came upon him when his own people had bound him, and the cords were like flax touched by the flame, and a thousand Philistines fell dead under his arm. How often is it recorded, in the time of the Judges, that the Spirit of God came upon some one, and then he had such strength that no opposing host could stand before him in battle ! Distance in space never separated any object from the presence of the Holy Spirit ; and it was believed that in some instances the hand of the Spirit had miraculously and instantly transferred a prophet from one point to a very distant and inaccessible place. The good friend said to Elijah that he now knew where he was, and he might AND HIS WORD. 193 go and report to the king where he had found him ; but, while he was going, the Spirit of the Lord might carry him away to some distant point where no one in Israel could find him, and so the king's search would be useless, and the report would only bring a friend into difiiculty with the king. The sons of the prophets who witnessed the ascension of Elijah called it the wonderful work of the Spirit, and they insisted on their theory that the Spirit of the Lord might have taken him up out of their sight and let him down on some distant mountain where it might be in their power to find him. The Spirit of the Lord came upon the prophet Ezekiel in Chaldea, and raised him up and transported him between the earth and the heaven, and over rivers, and from country to country, until, in the visions of God, he was standing in Jerusalem; and there he passed through different gates at the temple; he stood in secret chambers where heathen abominations were going on ; he saw twenty-five men with their backs to the holy temple, and their faces toward the east, in the actual worship of the sun ; he saw the godly patriots separated by a mark from the idolaters, and the six angels inflicting unsparing destruction on the latter ; he saw the same cherubim and subordinate living wheels which had been revealed to him in Chaldea ; he saw the twenty-five worst men there, in whom the moral, evils of the city centred ; he saw one of these worst men fall dead before the word of the Lord ; he saw the glory of the Lord rising up from the temple and passing eastward to stand over the Mount of Olives : and then the Spirit of the Lord carried him back to Chaldea and set him down among the captives, to whom he narrated all these things in Jerusalem which the vision had revealed to him. It is said that Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted of the devil ; and in that temptation he went I 17 194 THE SPIRIT OF THE LORD to Jerusalem and actually stood on the pinnacle of the temple, where it was suggested to him to cast himself down. The transfer of Ezekiel from Chaldea to Jerusa- lem doubtless illustrates the transfer of Jesus by the Holy Spirit into the wilderness and to the pinnacle of the tem- ple : the two are equally inexplicable ; they both bear the same miraculous character ; they exhibit the power of the Holy Spirit over flesh and blood ; they exhibit the power of the Spirit to loosen the chains that bind the soul down to the body ; they illustrate the power of God's Spirit to change intervening space into nothing, in an instant or the twinkling of an eye. Moses wrote his five books for the Spirit of God, and likewise this Spirit is the true author of the Scriptures of the prophets and of the Psalms. While the Christian dis- pensation is called pre-eminently the dispensation of the Spirit, it should always be remembered that the legisla- tion of Moses was in a high sense a dispensation of the Spirit. Many persons may be surprised to find how often the Holy Spirit is mentioned as the guide of Moses and the people in the wilderness. Let the eye run over the follow- ing passage among the last prophecies of Isaiah : "In his love and in his pity he redeemed them ; and he bare them, and carried them all the days of old. But they rebelled, and vexed his holy Spirit : therefore he was turned to be their enemy, and he fought against them. Then he remembered the days of old, Moses, and his peo- ple, saying. Where is he that brought them up out of tlie sea with the shepherd of his flock ? where is he that put his holy Spirit within him ? that led them by the right hand of Moses with his glorious arm, dividing the water before them, to make himself an everlasting name? that led them through the deep, as a horse in the wilderness, that they should not stumble ? As a beast goeth down AND HIS WORD. 195 into the valley, the Spirit of the Lord caused him to rest; so didst thou lead thy people, to make thyself a glorious name." And here let it be particularly noticed how the Holy Spirit is mentioned three times in this extract, and how clear it is that this Spirit was acknowledged as the Divine guide of Moses and the flock of Israel in the wil- derness. The Lord at one time descended in a cloud and took of the Spirit that was on Moses and made the seventy elders sharers of the same ; and they all began to prophesy, and continued prophets for a single day ; and there were two in the camp, distant from the tabernacle, that shared the same supernatural inspiration, and pro- phesied with wonderful effect. Moses was indignant that any one should think that they ought to be restrained out in the camp, and his highest wish was that all the Lord's people might become prophets under the power of the same Spirit. That was a day of the wonderful power of the Spirit in the wilderness ; it was a day when a very strong light from the upper sanctuary flashed upon the tabernacle. That good day was gratefully mentioned a thousand years afterwards, when Nehemiah introduced the language into his prayer and confession, "Thou gavest also thy good spirit to instruct them, and withheld- est not thy manna from their mouth, and gavest them water for their thirst." The Spirit, the manna, and the water from the rock were three gifts in the wilderness ; but the Spirit, as being of the highest value, deserved to be mentioned first. The later Scriptures rest on the same basis with the books of Mftses, as being the productions of the Spirit of God. One prophet writes, "But truly I am full of power by the spirit of the Lord, and of judgment, and of might, to declare unto Jacob his transgression, and to Israel his sin." One of the last prophets in Israel de- 196 THE SPIRIT OF THE LORD clares the sins of the fathers and the consequent judg- ments : "Yea, they made their hearts as an adamant stone, lest they should hear the law and the words which the Lord of hosts hath sent in his spirit by the former prophets : therefore came a great wrath from the Lord of hosts." How fearful was this guilt resting on the people, that they had refused to hear the words which God's Spirit had brought to them by the prophets ! The same Divine words are now before us in the prophets which we daily read. Another of these last prophets mentions the Spirit in the strongest language of encouragement : the Lord speaks through him: "According to the word that I covenanted with you when ye came out of Egypt, so my spirit remaineth among you: fear ye not." This verse of Haggai may be described as the seal of the Spirit of God on the first Scriptures and the last, on both the books of Moses and the writings of the prophets who closed the canon after the captivity. And if some special seal of the Spirit ought to be found in the middle of the volume between Moses and the prophets, if the Psalms of David in the middle ought to have a separate and peculiar seal, then look at the life of David where it begins, "Samuel took the horn of oil, and anointed him in the midst of his brethren : and the Spirit of the Lord came upon David from that day for- ward:" and next look at the closing piece of all the writings of David, where the verse stands at the head, " The Spirit of the Lord spake by me, and his word was in my tongue." The seal of the Holy Spirit was found in the Bible, cer- tifying it as the infallible rule of faith and practice; and then the most glorious day in the distant future was iden- tified as the day of the Spirit. The sound of desolation, the vision of darkness, might be awfully spread over dis- AND HIS IVORD. I97 tant future ages ; but often the prophet's voice reached such a word as the word until, and just there the desola- tion came to a pause, and a new hope began to blaze ; it was the until of Isaiah, — ^^ Until the spirit be poured upon us from on high, and the wilderness be a fruitful field." All the future is vast fields of wilderness and death until the shower of the Spirit falls on it, and instantly it all rises in roses and blossoms. Behold the picture of the blessedness in the last days, which one of the prophets gives: "And it shall come to pass afterward, that I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh ; and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions : and also upon the servants and upon the handmaids in those days will I pour out my spirit. And I will show wonders in the heavens and in the earth, blood, and fire, and pillars of smoke. The sun shall be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood, before the great and the terrible day of the Lord come." The blessed clay will be when all, young and old, elevated and humble, will be the subjects of the mighty influence of the Spirit, and when young persons will rise to a higher degree of spiritual discern- ment and assurance than the aged. It was the Spirit of the Lord which Samuel said should come upon the young Saul and turn him into another man. The Spirit now makes his own truth effectual, and changes the wicked man into a new man : he brings the gift of a new heart into our world, and it will be his work to change the wicked race of Adam into a holy people, and our blasted earth into another earth. The future has no hope for mankind except what the Spirit of God, enthroned in the mighty future, gives it. The verse of Isaiah which was placed at the head of this letter now resumes its place in our thoughts, that 17* iqS the spirit of the lord the Spirit of the Lord which he had put within Israel, and his words which he had put within their mouth, should not depart out of their mouth, nor out of the mouth of their seed, nor out of the mouth of their seed's seed, forever. If the question rises, Who is this Spirit? the answer is furnished : He is the Spirit compelling Balaam to chant celestial encomiums when the malignant desire which filled the heart was to pour forth foul male- dictions, and keeping the envious Saul prostrate and ex- posed a whole day and a whole night on the ground ; he is the Spirit who sows the seeds of the useful and orna- mental arts in human intellects, and strengthens the hero for marvelous achievement, and, with the power to anni- hilate distance, brings the two poles of our planet, and heaven and earth, together in a moment ; he is the Spirit who gave his words to Moses and the prophets to be written in majestic prose, and to David to be written in enchanting song, and to whom hope looks exclusively for the spiritual regeneration of our world. This Spirit and God's word are placed together in this text. They are placed together in the mouth of Israel. They are placed together in the mouth of the seed of Israel. They are placed together in the mouth of the seed of the seed of Israel, till the end of all ages. God has joined them together ; let them never be separated. Never let the Israel arise believing in the Spirit of God but not believ- ing in the word, — rejecting the law and the prophets ; and never let the Israel arise believing in the written law, the holy Scriptures, but not believing in the Spirit of God. The Holy Spirit dwelling in the heart has here the first place in the creed, and the written word, sounding from the reader's lips, has the second place in the creed ; and this twofold creed must remain forever the creed on the lips of the Jews. It would be an anomalous and use- AND HIS WORD. 199 less creed which embraced the written word but rejected the Divine Spirit the Author. This Spirit is made the capital figure in the creed of Israel as long as the earth stands. And while the law and the prophets are read in all the synagogues every Saturday, and this is mentioned as a proof that the words of God have not departed, and cannot depart, from the mouth of Israel, it deserves to be marked as a fearful apostasy from the true faith if the Divine Spirit has been obliterated from his place at the head of the creed, while the written word, the law and the prophets, are still retained sacredly in the reader's mouth and the service of the synagogue. If the special reasons are demanded why the Holy Spirit must always be retained on the lips of the true worshipers of God, and must never be expunged from their confession of faith, the first reason is that the church needs the honest man, and the Holy Spirit creates this man. The noblest man in the world is the man who is honest in his relations to God. Dishonesty in religion is universal among men. They can appear per- fectly honest towards all their neighbors with infinitely greater ease than they can be truly honest towards God. They have more deceit in the service which they give to God than in any other service. No selfishness is so abomi- nable as selfishness in religion. No lying is so abominable as the lying to God ; and men generally are as ready for such lying as was the old serpent in the garden of Eden. The Holy Spirit is needed to take the religious lying out of our nature, and create a holy love of the truth. Re- ligious prejudices are the most blinding that exist. If mathematics had the same close cgnnection with our de- praved nature that religion has, and if our prejudices were as perverse and blinding in mathematics as they are in religion, it would indeed be' wonderful to know what 200 THE SriRTT OF THE LORD different arithmetics we would have, and what conflicting systems of algebra and geometry; and probably a horrible Inquisition would have flourished for a century, founded on the question whether the three angles of a triangle are together equal to two right angles. I have had some knowledge by personal experience of the unfairness of Universalists in their arguments before the public, by which they uphold their principles that all punishment of sin must cease at the moment of death. A Universalist opens a Greek dictionary to search for the word Gehenna, and he will find three items: i, the word was originally the Valley of Hinnom, a valley lying southward from Jerusalem, where children once passed through the fire to Moloch and the filth of the city was received ; 2, it came to stand for an infamous burial, or an infamous exposure after death ; 3, it assumed the specific meaning of the world of punishment and shame where the wicked dwell after death ; and this is its mean- ing through the New Testament : and this Universalist will read these first two items to an audience and suppress the third ; he will make the impression that all that he finds in the dictionary is that it is the literal Valley of Hinnom and expresses only an infamous retribution on earth. If it was the word Jcrusalevi, he could act with more honesty. He could read such a definition as the following from any dictionary: Jerusalem, — i, a city of the Jebusites, of which David took possession to make it his capital ; 2, a name for the church of God on earth ; 3, a name of the church in heaven, as in the stanza, — " Jerusalem, my happy home, Name ever dear to me ! Wlien shall my labors liave an end In joy, and peace, and thee?" and he would here make the third item just as prominent AND HIS WORD. 201 as either of the others. But the word Gehenna must suffer the injustice of the suppression of the third and essential item, while the greatest falsehood that is ever told may be the two-thirds of the statement, with such a showing as if these two-thirds were the whole. This shows how religious prejudice becomes dishonest. The man is determined to cast off all fear of the anger of God in respect to the future after death ; and hence either he cannot see the third and essential item in the definition of the momentous word, or he convinces himself that he ought not to see it. Dr. Wise, in his " Origin of Christianity," page 30, ob- jects to the day of the week given for the crucifixion of Jesus, and he makes a sweeping statement that "the first day of the passover never was on a Friday, and never can be, according to established principles of the Jewish calendar:" but he certainly has not duly weighed this statement. I suppose that a custom has not permitted a passover to begin on a Friday for a thousand years and more; but in the age when Christianity had its origin the Pharisees and Sadducees had one of their greatest battles around this very point. The Pharisees had the sheaf of the first-fruits cut in Friday night after the com- mencement of the sabbath, to be offered to the Lord the next morning, and they made the proceeding as public as possible, to show their contempt of the Sadducees ; and in every year, when the sheaf was thus given to the Lord on the sabbath, the first day of the passover must have been a Friday. The Sadducees contended that the cutting of the sheaf in that night was a desecration of the sabbath, and that the waving of the sheaf should always be on the morrow after the sabbath, that is, Sunday ; and also the first day of pentecost should always be a Sunday ; and the Karaites hold the same vie v with them till the present I* 202 THE SPIRIT OF THE LORD day. (See Jost's Geschichte des Judenthums, Streitig- keiten zwischen Pharisiiern und Sadd*caern, with Men- delssohn's Commentary on Lev. xxiii. 2, and the Book on the Karaites, dedicated to the Lady Guinzburg.) Doubters on the authority of the New Testament have pointed to a verse in the second chapter of Luke, " And this taking was first made when Cyrenius was governor of Syria;" and they have made a correct criticism, that if the birth of Jesus was at the time of this taxing it could not have been before the death of Herod the Great, as is stated in other places, because this taxation under Cyre- nius was after the reign of Archelaus, and fully nine years after the death of Herod. But the word protos, which is in this verse, is translated by the word before in John, first chapter and thirtieth verse ; and there it governs the genitive case, as it does here. We read there, " For he was before me," and, by analogy, it ought to be translated here, " This taxing was before Cyrenius the governor of Syria." Most clearly, having occurred while Herod was alive, it was a taxing about ten years earlier than Cyrenius, or the famous taxing which he introduced. Again and again learned Jewish critics have harped on this difficulty, which so instantly vanishes. I once saw it demonstrated to a Jew that this same government of the genitive by an ad- jective in the superlative degree occurs in Homer and other Greek authors, and that a correct knowledge of Greek syntax cannot fail to correct the mistake ; but he became almost furious, as if the whole fabric of Judaism would be brought into fearful danger if he could not sustain this silly anachronism against the New Testament. What a blind thing prejudice is ! A few critics have a habit of handling the four gospels with enormous injustice. They come forward with some fantastic theory and put the torture on every dissentient AND HIS WORD. 203 verse they meet, to get it out of their way. They lay paral- lel passages together, and count how many more words may be in one gospel than in the others ; they raise a difficulty on everything that one has omitted, and if the same story or parable is found in two gospels with differences in the events narrated before it or after it, they search with microscopic care for all appearances of con- tradiction ; if one gospel says Peter and another says Cephas, surely there are ignorant people who do not know that these words have the same meaning, and they may be troubled with this as a contradiction. The true view is that the very marked differences between the gos- pels furnish an unanswerable argument that the writers are four independent witnesses, and that their testimony is the truth. Four witnesses may appear in court and tell completely the same story, and their whole story may be so perfectly alike that every one is convinced that they con- sulted together and arranged previously among them- selves precisely what should be their story. Independent witnesses never put the same facts in precisely the same language and the same connection and order. If the four gospels had been composed according to the measure which these critics apply to them, it would have been made very clear that the whole is the story of one author, and not the stories of four independent writers. A thou- sand times and more have I written the letters M. R. M., but on no two sheets have I ever written them perfectly the same; and if any note should ever come to me with these letters perfectly as I once wrote them, they might be decisive proof that they were transcribed by careful measurement and that I never wrote them. The four evangelists ought to ' be allowed to show the same evi- dences of their independence as are allowed to other witnesses in court ] but there cannot be such evidences 204 THE SPIRIT OF THE LORD without differences. All these things show us how strong religious prejudice becomes : it will not read the whole definition of a word in a dictionary, it refuses to see the rules of Greek grammar, and it objects to the indispen- sable evidences that there was no collusion of the evan- gelists. Come, Holy Spirit, come, dispel from our eyes the blindness of religious prejudice ! I see Jesus near to Samaria on the way to Jerusalem, and one comes to him and says, "Lord, I will follow thee whithersoever thou goest. And Jesus said unto him. Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests ; but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head." This answer indicates that there was a wrong thing in his motives, and that Jesus saw it. Many followed Jesus for the loaves and fishes. This man expected worldly comfort ; he expected to come to a good home. Jesus wished him to know that humble poverty was all the prospect his disciples had. This man made the best promise; but he was not worthy to be trusted, he was not the man to follow through poverty and death. He loved his own flesh too highly. Many persons have no confidence in the conversion of Jews in our own time. They say that no Jew ever enters the Christian church except for support or for a name, or for some object in social life, or from some other sinister mo- tive. When you find any one who has been thoroughly educated as a Jew, and embraces Christianity and is sin- cere, you may be sure you have found a miracle. No Jew ever becomes a genuine Christian except under an influence of the Holy Spirit that is miraculous. It is now easy to some of them to promise that they will follow Jesus whithersoever he goeth, but it is another thing to be sincere ; and how many of them have some other master in their eye than him who lived in poverty AND HIS WORD. 205 beneath the foxes and the birds, so that he had not where to lay his head ! The apostle Paul says " that no man can say that Jesus is the Lord, but by the Holy Ghost," and assuredly this is true of one people; it is true of the Jews: no Jew becomes a genuine Christian except under the power of the Holy Spirit, and all who do not believe in the Holy Ghost are clearly consistent in denying that there can be any man now on the face of the earth who has been brought up a strict Jew and is now a sincere Christian. Come, Holy Spirit, come ; for in thy absence there is no honest will to follow the Lord, through pov- erty and death, whithersoever he goeth ! At the same time another was nearly ready to follow Jesus; but he said, "Lord, suffer me first to go and bury my father." Ah, there was one thing holding him back. His father was still living. His father, we must suppose, was 'a Jew of the strictest order, and hated the name of Jesus, and could not bear the thought that his son should become a disciple: the grief caused by his son's conversion would be overwhelming, and he had threatened to disinherit him, and ordered him never again to enter his house, if he must follow Jesus. The son felt as if he must first see his father buried, and then he would follow Jesus. There are many such Jews in our own day, — Jews who are convinced that Jesus is indeed the Messiah of Israel, but a dear father must go into his grave before they can be baptized. Come, Holy Spirit, come : it is only thy voice that can ever call them away effectually from waiting at their fathers' graves, and tufn their faces to their duty ! "And another also said. Lord, I will follow thee ; but let me first go bid them farewell which are at home at my house." Jesus saw that he had too great a love of his friends at home, and hence that solemn answer was given, 18 2o6 HIE SPIRIT OF THE LORD — how searching the ansA\ier, how alarming ! — "No man having put his hand to the plough, and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God." The Holy Spirit is needed to give men such a love of the truth and of holiness that they can leave all their friends at home and never look back with one tear of regret. A self-denial is required which is never properly learned except in the school of the Holy Spirit. Religion is utterly worthless if it be not honest in its hidden parts ; and the will to forsake all earthly friends and follow the Lord is never truly honest except in that heart where there has been the mighty work of the Holy Spirit. Tradition is very hurtful in religion if it is admitted to assume the place of the Holy Spirit. It is nowhere found recorded in* the Bible that the Lord has said. My oral law, which was received at Sinai and was to be preserved in the memory from age to age, and my words which Moses and the prophets committed to writing, shall never depart from thy mouth, nor from the mouth of thy seed, nor from the mouth of thy seed's seed ; because this would be introducing the traditionary law to fill the place where the Spirit of the Lord stands; yet, practically, many accept the text just as it would be perverted by such a change. The brazen serpent has its place in the writings of Moses, and there it exists in innocence; but when it passed into the hands of tradition it became an object of idolatrous worship, and incense continued to be burnt to it through many centuries. There was a time when the written law had almost passed out of sight, and tradition had assumed almost the whole charge of the Jewish wor- ship ; and the king was once astonished to get a sight of the long-buried law and find how many things were condemned in it which the popular voice then sanctioned. Amazement filled the Christian world in the sixteenth AND HIS WORD. 207 century, when the Scriptures began again to be searched which the priests had long kept concealed, and it was found how tradition had made such a wide departure from the primitive Christian faith, how it had corrupted Chris- tian doctrine and worship, and introduced a large mass of heathenism under new names. Tradition must not be trusted as the interpreter of God's word, because it has horribly abused such a trust ; and the order appointed in the Bible is the Spirit of the Lord first, as the infallible interpreter, and secondly the written word fi-om Moses and the prophets, of which he is the interpreter. It is equally hurtful to religion if the church assumes to fill the place where the Holy Spirit ought to be. One great error now growing within Christendom is to place that trust in the church which ought to be placed in the Lord. Men depend on the church to pray for them, and neglect to pray for themselves ; and if one must answer the question, what he believes, his answer is, I believe what the church believes. It is supposed that private judg- i-nent may err, but that the judgment of the whole church cannot err. The mistake of these persons is that they depend not so much on the Shepherd of Israel himself as on the flock. He is infallible, but the flock are not infallible ; he is the eternal rock of safety, but the flock may wander and be scattered and fall into a thousand snares. The church may wander from the faith and leave her first love, and fall so low that she has only a name to live while she is dead. No man ought ever to commit his soul to such a body or company for salvation. There is the higher rock on which the soul can stand. If any man depends on his church, it is indirectly an idolatrous adora- tion of himself: because, who is his church ? It is only an aggregation of persons like himself, some of them more intelligent than he is, and very many just as igno- 2o8 THE SPIRIT OF THE LORD rant. We may carry the open Bible in our hands, and still we will trust in the church iiiore than we trust in the Lord, if the Spirit of the Lord be not present to lead us. A pope commits a great mistake if he attempts to take the seat of the Holy Ghost as the infallible interpreter of the word of God. There is a wide-spread feeling in Christendom that the world ought to have one living person as the infallible interpreter of the true Christian faith. This one living guide ought to have perfect proofs of his infallibility ; his name ought to be known among all nations ; he ought to be a master of all languages, and so all nations might bring religious questions to him to be decided finally and infallibly in his presence. Jesus Christ was an infallible interpreter while he was on earth; but his public life continued only about three years, and his name was little known beyond the limits of Pales- tine; and if any point in his teaching is clear, it is this, that no mortal man should be his successor or vicar on the earth, and that when he should leave the earth the Holy Ghost should be sent in his place, to bring all things to the remembrance of the disciples which he had spoken, to be the comforter, and the infallible interpreter of the truths of salvation, and to abide with his people till the end of the world. Finally, man's reason must not be permitted to usurp the place of the Holy Spirit, as the supreme interpreter of the Scriptures. A living mortal pope will be just as safe a guide as reason if it is made the pope. When the Lord says that his Spirit which is within his people, and his words which are in their mouths, shall not depart out of their mouths as long as the world lasts, his Spirit must not be accepted here as only another name for human reason. The Spirit of the Lord and man's faculty of reason are widely different. AND HIS iVORD. 209 When reason is made supreme, religion becomes ration- alism, and the essential character of the whole Bible becomes changed. Abraham is no longer the man to whom the Almighty came in actual visions, but he is a sage of a philosophic turn of mind, who reflected on the rising and setting of the sun and stars, and became con- vinced that they were only the works of God and ought not to be worshiped, and he found out by his own reason the absurdity of the popular belief in many gods. Moses becomes a character obscurely seen among the clouds of false pretension and popular fiction ; he has indeed given a good system of laws, but he has mixed them up with many things that cannot be believed because they contra- dict reason, such as that the finger of God wrote the ten commandments on two tables, that there was salvation for the first-born of Israel in Egypt through the sprinkling of blood at the door, that he continued forty days and forty nights alone with God on the mount to receive the laws, that the manna was the food of the people for forty years, furnishing a double supply every Friday morning, with no supply on Saturday, that the sight of the brazen serpent effected the cure of many who were dying from the sting of the fiery serpents, — so that it is a question how any great living truth could be laid out in such coffins of absurd fictions and not itself become putrid. Especially is the typical character of the Mosaic system denied : it was not composed of prophetic symbols, pointing to better things to come more than a thousand years in the future. Moses was a shrewd legislator, making many false pretensions to inspire the people with awe. Such is rationalism. Behold it: such is the theory when reason supplants the Holy Spirit. Reason has decided that though it is often claimed in the book of Isaiah that the conquests of Cyrus were fore- told in that book long before any eye of man could see 18* 2IO THE SPIRIT OF THE LORD them, yet these parts of the book must have been written by another Isaiah after the events. Reason has decided that Paul did not believe in his heart the doctrines of the resurrection, of the atonement, and of the second coming of Christ, which he preached. Reason rejects the expla- nation of the Jewish worship which is in the Epistle to the Hebrews, and ventures to suggest a different theory, — that the brazen altar might stand for all animals, the golden altar for all spices, the seven lamps within the sanctuary for the seven stars, the sanctuary and its courts in front for the earth, and the supremely holy apartment for heaven. Reason declares its doubts whether the patri- archs were inspired with a firm hope of a glorious immor- tality ; and when they are seen in the Epistle to the Hebrews traveling as strangers and pilgrims, with no landed possession here, and not expecting rest here, for the eternal city which they believed God had prepared for them, reason shuts its eyes against this light, as being too dazzling. There is a proper place for reason in religion, where it is religion's useful, beautiful, and humble handmaid ; but out of its place it becomes the dangerous sorceress, it becomes the beautiful Cleopatra ; and the disgrace, the madness, the ruin, the desperation, which this guilty woman brought on her Antony and herself are only feeble figures to set forth how dangerous reason is when it is enthroned as a goddess in religion ; and it is always made a goddess when it is set in the place of the Holy Spirit. The French people once attempted to utter' blasphemies against the Holy Ghost of the Bible, and to worship reason as their goddess; and the terrific results which ensued, the refuge which many leading infidels sought in the horrible deed of suicide, ought to be a lesson and a warning never to be forgotten in the world. AND HIS WORD. 21 1 Supposing that I have some particular friend who has been seduced by the voice of deified reason until he has stumbled into the low pit of skepticism, where he sits in doubt of the veracity of both Moses and Paul, and where all religion has almost passed away from his vision as one of the mists of unenlightened ages, I wish to extend my voice to him and have a few earnest words with him. My friend, is not this a dark pit where you are sitting ? Is it not really a dark dungeon ? It is sad indeed if your own pride of intellect and blinding prejudices have brought you to this place. It is sad if you are now here because a strong light once shone on you in a better place, but you inwardly loved darkness rather than light, and this brought you down. You ought to examine whether there has been a hatred of the pure truth concealed in your heart, as all such hatred involves a fearful guilt. If some element of wickedness in your own heart has caused all this darkness in which you are now sitting, you are doing wrong to be sitting here in peace. There is one saying of Jesus which possibly ought to be a touch of fire to your sleeping conscience : the saying is this : "If any man will do his will, he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God, or whether I speak of myself." (John vii. 17.) Weigh this verse in your conscience : If any man wills to do the holy will of the Father, if any man wishes to know how he may travel up to God, and how he may gather others with him on the way to heaven, if he truly desires to learn what are the duties for him in the kingdom of God, Jesus appears to declare explicitly that darkness cannot continue to hold him a prisoner. " He shall know of the doctrine;" he will pass out from the dungeon of doubt into light, he will become satisfied whether Jesus brought the message of God or brought his own message. Jesus attaches great importance to truth in the man's 212 THE SPIRIT OF THE LORD heart, or those inquiries after the truth which have their origin in sincerity. Subjective truth and objective truth cannot be naturally separated ; where a man desires to have the truth, the bars of prejudice become broken, and the objective light, the external doctrine of Jesus, naturally passes into his heart and fills it. If a man is sitting in darkness concerning the will of God because his own will has closed his eyes to the light, he ought to find out the wrong thing in himself before the great day of judgment brings it out. May I offer you, my friend, a key which you may try on the doors of your dark dungeon, and possibly it will open every one ? This key lies in another saying of Jesus. Let me read it : " If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask him !" (Luke xi. 13.) The Holy Spirit is thus offered to those who are sitting in darkness, to those who are chained in a dungeon; but they do not feel their chains, and sup- pose they are free. Heaven cannot offer a more precious gift than the Holy Spirit. He is the eternal light within God himself, the light of truth, of faith, of hope, of holi- ness, of love, and of comfort. His holy name appears in brilliant letters through all parts of the Bible. Balaam and Saul knew his power, and fell to the ground, and were compelled to give utterance to his holy inspirations, though they both were travelers by choice in the dark and down- ward road, and they escaped from him only to rush on faster to ruin. Moses and the prophets knew his power, put on their robes of light in his illumination, and re- joiced in his grace. He is sent to those who ask for him, to guide them into light. Have you continued sitting in this dungeon, and never earnestly asked the Father to send you the Spirit? If prayer may bring you an infal- AND HIS WORD. 213 lible guide and mighty deliverer, prayer is clearly your first duty. The best key to try now on the doors of your prison is prayer. If you remain here because you have no will to make one humble prayer for light, an infinitely more horrible darkness may soon bring its clouds over you, and you will have no one to blame except yourself. If these two texts have the right to be cited as the words of the Holy Ghost, if these two fundamental prin- ciples which support the doctrine of Jesus are sound, — first, that those who sincerely wish to be at work in the holy service of God naturally come to find the Divine will in the teaching of Jesus, and, secondly, that the Holy Spirit comes to guide those who ask for him, into the light, — every man ought instantly to see on what the safety of his soul depends. He ought also to see that two such pillars never support a false doctrine, and that if Jesus spoke thus he must have brought his message from God. If a house has its foundation in holy sincerity without blinding prejudice, and in religious instruction and prayer for the Holy Spirit, travelers need not be afraid to lodge in it over night. My friend, bend your knees, and try to call upon the Lord from your dungeon of skepticism. Unite with me in this prayer : "Thou Father in heaven, thou fountain of all light, if thou sendest thy Holy Spirit to be the guide of the blind, here is one who is blind ; but, though blind, I would try to pray. May I believe in the Holy Spirit and in the Scriptures, if this is the right belief. I would not sit in darkness, when I ought to be doing thy work in the clear light of day. I would not be closing my own eyes against the light, when I ought to be actively holding out a light to others to cheer them on their upward way to God. I Avould make thy service in thine own kingdom 214 ^-^^ SPIRIT OF THE LORD the choice and delight of my heart, rather than the ser- vice of the world. Send thy truth into my heart, even if all the prejudices of my education should be aroused against it. May I receive thy truth, and be unable to resist it, even if it should alarm me, and condemn all my past life, and bring over my soul a horror of great dark- ness. May thy truth be dearer to me than worldly prop- erty and all my friends. Let it not be my condemnation that light has come into the world, but that I loved dark- ness rather than light. ' Search me, O God, and know my heart; try me, and know my thoughts; and see if there be any wicked way in me, and lea.d me in the way everlasting.' Lord, what wilt thou have me to do ? I would ask this same thing every day, — What wilt thou have me to do ? If thou dost send thy Spirit in answer to prayer, as Jesus appears to have taught, I would now commit to the hand of thy Spirit my whole soul, and especially my mind struggling in darkness, and my selfish and debased nature." Can the doubter of all religion make this prayer sin- cerely and regularly, never omitting it for a single morning, and not come out of his darkness into light ? It appears to me almost impossible. The sincere wish to come to God's truth, if it exercise itself in the secret whis- pers of prayer, naturally dissolves the strength of skep- ticism, as the warm sun causes the snow to disappear. Prayer carries the soul up into light, too near to God to let skepticism still be freezing over it. Do try, then, my friend, if you can find a true relief for your doubts in prayer. Most men suppose it to be proper to pray for the bread which perishes; but there is a higher propriety in asking God for the spiritual bread which the soul needs. Is it said that skeptics do not pray, — that skepticism reasonably produces a dislike of prayer, or a want of faith AND HIS WORD. 215 in it? then on this single ground let skepticism be uncon- ditionally condemned. If a man is an atheist, still he never can go further than the region of doubts; he never can reach a demonstrated certainty that there is no God : and so long as the whole subject still continues in doubt, his only safe and wise course is to make the prayer every day, "God, if thou dost exist, hear me and give me thy help." Circumstances are often such that it is a man's duty to raise the loudest cry for help even if there be no certainty that there is any one to help him within the reach of his cry. The skeptic never takes one step in the long race of life where it is a certainty that God is so distant from him that his call for mercy and help could not reach him. No man has a right to excuse himself for the entire neglect of prayer on the ground that he is an atheist. He may see no proof satisfactory to himself that there is a God ; yet a God may be, and this God may be the hearer of prayer. If an atheist make it his secret prayer daily that if a God of love does exist his own soul may be visited with the light of this love, there may be a serene gem of honesty in that man's heart more valuable in "the sight of God than all the massive learning of scoff- ing and prayerless infidels. There is no senseless head living more unreasonable than the skeptic who supposes that the wonderful religious faculties of the human soul have no deep meaning. Poor people, whose circle of knowledge is very limited, sometimes have the greatest enjoyment in religion ; they may have a pure and intelligent delight in their Bibles, though they have never made the evidences of revealed religion a special study, and have never had time for such studies, and their simple faith in the Divine promises may give them a continued sunshine of the heart along the journey of life, while the scholar of stupendous learning 21 6 THE SPIRIT OF THE LORD and abilit)' may taste no such celestial food. The reason may be that they have obtained by prayer the Holy Spirit as their guide and comforter, and thus they rise in light nearer to God, while the other's learning and pride of intellect convince him of the uselessness of prayer for light, and hold him down heavily to the earth. God brings the poor and humble to his own table, while the rich and the wise may stay away, supposing that they have all needful wisdom without the Holy Spirit, and perish. If the Bible has indeed this precious promise of the Holy Spirit for us in our search after God, it is wrong to speak doubtfully of this gift, and especially is there a flagrant wrong in speaking contemptuously of it. Any word or. act which implies a dishonor of the holiness of God or of his spiritual nature is among the most virulent offenses. Whether we learn the character and work of the Holy Spirit in the school of Moses alone, or accept also the teaching of the New Testament along with Moses, Jesus has left a momentous warning for persons of every faith and of all ages, in the words, *' He that shall blas- pheme against the Holy Ghost hath never forgiveness, but is in danger of eternal damnation." If you walk close to the truth as your friend, you have the best of all friends; but if the truth be against you, the worst of all enemies is against you. Place the truth in the supreme seat, and your own theory in a lower seat : give up to the truth to determine your theory, and set not up your own theory to determine the truth. Open all the heart, that truth and love may enter and possess it for- ever. If I may imagine these lines printed, and ever perused by some person who hates the light that reproves his deeds and corrects his views, and is stubborn in his preju- AND HIS WORD. 217 dices, I would leave the following lines of Young sound- ing in his ears : " Seize wisdom, ere 'tis torment to be wise ; That is, seize wisdom ere she seizes thee. For what, my small philosopher, is hell ? 'Tis nothing but full knowledge of the truth. When truth, resisted long, is sworn our foe, And calls eternity to do her right." M. R. M. NOTE SUPPLEMENTARY TO THE FIRST EDITION. A Theological Review of the highest character, has pronounced the style of reasoning at many points, overstrained. The candid reader is here invited to review briefly the ascending steps in the argument founded on the word yehovah — the argument that it is both a Dt^ DXj.'n and a INH Djy, a Proper Noun and a Common Noun, and that in the later Scriptures it eminently unfolds itself as a Common Noun or appellative ; and to decide whether any step is evidently overstrained. I. The first step is the anomaly in the verse, "Hear, O Israel : yehovah our God is one yehovah^ if Jehovah in both parts of the verse is a Proper Noun, inasmuch as it then has too great a similarity to this kind of a sen- tence : Hear, O Americans 1 George Washington our first President was one George Washington. This anomaly is elegantly illustrated by Men- delssohn in his Beur on Gen. xlviii. 22, where the dying Jacob is found saying to Joseph, " Moreover, I have given to thee one portion above thy brethren." The word portion here is Shechem in the original, and some propose to take it as a Proper Noun, the name of a town ; " More- over, I have given to thee one Shechem." Mark with what language Mendelssohn dismisses this rendering : i£Dijy£3o pirn Ninty n^bo ,DDty yy bp D'tyiDon Sty "'£3n Sax "But the reference of some expositors to the city Shechem, besides that it is far from the obvious import of the text, mark also that the word one does not suit after it, because a fixed Proper Noun does not associate itself with a numeral." A most lucid criticism ! And just as the word Shechem cannot here join itself to the numeral one (IPX), if it is a Proper Noun ; so, in the great text, the word Jehovah cannot, if it is a Proper 19 ^ 2 1 S SUPPLEMENTAR Y. Noun, be joined to the numeral otie (IPN) as its adjective. It must be admitted that the force of this criticism is very considerably evaded by the translation, " Hear, O Israel! Jehovah is our God, Jehovah is one." But the LXX. rejected this rendering ; nearly every approved version ac- cepts the verse as rendered in King James' Bible, and even the Prayer- book for German and Polish Jews, printed in London A. M. 5596, trans- lates it, " Hear, O Israel ! the Lord our God is one God," thus taking the last two words as a predicate, and not both subject and predicate. 2. Another element of verity and strength is found in the decision of the most learned and eminent Rabbi Aben Ezra on this question. Read his elucidation of the words yehovah and ydiovah in immediate conti- guity in Exodus xxxiv. 6 : ,D^"ity Dm mo d'o;'£ii i^nn Diy Nin D'd;'3 o nioty nbxi niyiD3 n'ty'on jnni ,n^;roi oimi ,r\-^-hMi Sn nSoi "And behold the transcendent name (niiT) they have introduced among characteristics [definitions, measures], and it is a Proper Noun. And already I have mentioned in the section Veeleh Shemoth [the first section in Exodus prescribed for synagogal reading] that in some places it is a Common Noun and in some places a characteristic ; and these make two, and the word El is the third, and Merciful is the fourth, Gracious the fifth." With this clear testimony of Aben Ezra before us. Christians are entitled to affirm that, even their enemies themselves being judges, the Proper Noun Jehovah became even as early as the writings of Moses, a Common Noun. It was possibly m the mind of Aben Ezra here, that the word Jehovah, passing into a Common Noun, indicated mercy, the divine characteristic, or the D'Om mO ; very much as it is imagined on page 40, that Moses Montefiore might become a Common Noun or con- crete of philanthropy. But this remaining undecided, it is on the simple point whether there is in the term Jehovah both the Proper Noun and the Common Noun that Aben Ezra is here called to decide ; and he does decide clearly. 3. The third step in the combined argument commences with Hannah, the mother of Samuel, who in her prayer before the ark appears as the first who placed the word Jehovah in the construct state with hosts, in the phrase ydiovah Sabaoth. How transccndenUy sacred this phrase was from the beginning, greatly above the phrase God of hosts (Elohe Sabaoth), is evinced in the verse 2 Sam. vi. 2 : " And David arose and went with all the people that were with him from Baale Judah to bring up from thence the ark of God (D'n7Xn jllX HN), upon wliich the name is called, the name Jehovah Sabaoth, the dweller of the Cher- ubim." The Septuaginl translates it here and in several other places, Loi-d of principalities {V^vpiov riiv Swafiewv), nndhy ilunameis the LXX. meant not the forces of nature among the stars, but the highest ranks SUPPLEMENTARY. 219 of holy angels. Remember how this phrase, exhibiting the ineffable name in the construct state, becomes multiplied in the Psalms, abounds Still more in the prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah ; and in the last prophets Zechariah and Malachi, and especially in Malachi, it spreads itself more abundantly over the whole field than with any earlier prophet. You find the particulars here, on pages 41, 42. The hundreds of texts where this phrase occurs are so many hundreds of proofs that the word Jehovah has taken the stamp of a Common Noun or appellative, it being one of the most unvarying principles in Hebrew grammar that a Proper Noun cannot be subjected to the construct state. (See foot-note on page 31.) 4. The fourth step comes on the verse Zech. xiii. 7, where is found the shepherd, the man that is the fellow of Jehovah of Sabaoth. Always when a Proper Noun becomes a Common Noun a fellow comes in, and this verse introduces the fellow of Jehovah of Sabaoth. The 28th page of this book proves that the -word JTOJ.' (the Hebrew word here trans- lated fellow) never in the Bible means an idol or an adversary or op- ponent, but always a second person standing with the first on the level of natural right and moral dignity. 5. Another element in the general arg^tment is extracted from the several verses which bring before us Jehovah one with Jehovah another. One verse is Gen. xix. 24, cited on page 71. Another such passage is Ex. vi. 2, 3, cited, pages 25, 222. Another is Ex. xxxiv. 6, cited, page 26. Another such passage contains Jehovah the primary agent and Jehovah the instrumental Saviour — namely, Hos. i. 7, cited, page 27. Another contains Jehovah, himself the King, and the King of Jehovah of Sabaoth, cited and elucidated, page 180. 6. The sixth item crowns all, and places the luminous robe around all the others. The sixth item in evidence is that the blessed name Jehovah comes to view in the New Testament only in the term Kurios, and that this term, as a divine name, in the New Testament is most unquestionably a Common Noun, or a name shared by more than one. For one highly relevant example read i Cor. viii. 6: " But to us there is but one God, the Father, of whom are all things, and we in him, and one Lord (Kurios) Jesus Christ, by whom are all things, and we by him." Here the divine name Kurios is withheld from God the Father and distinctively ascribed to Jesus Christ ; nevertheless, it belongs to both. This text bears no clearer witness for the appella- tive character of Kurios as a divine name than the other texts cited on page 168 and page 29. We find, therefore, that this appellative charac- ter of the divine name Lord is one of the clearest tenets of the New Testament ; that this tenet throws a wondrous track of light back over the Hebrew Bible ; that this track of light is widest and strongest among the prophets holding their places near the close of prophecy, in whose writings the phrase Jehovah of Sabaoth is found most profusely scat- 2 20 SUPPLEMENTAR Y. tered ; but it extends back through the Psalms to that prayer of Hannah which contains the first mention of Jehovah of Sabaoth, and the lumi- nous track makes itself visible still farther back, so as to reach Moses at his great distance and drop Aurora's crown on his head. Declare now where there is one step in all this comprehensive argument tliat is over- strained. It is an argument finely adjusted in all its parts, symmetrical, solid and towering as a pyramid, and wonderfully adapted to inspire every beholder with the exclamation. Oh, the deptli, the treasure inex- haustible, that is in the Scriptures ! These six steps may now introduce us to a rest, a seventh day of rest after six days, or that Sabbath of which the Son of man is Lord. Flash- ing light can be evolved from that remarkable text, Mark ii. 28 : " There- fore the Son of man is Lord also of the Sabbath." Here the term Lord is the divine name, yet it is a Common Noun — most clearly a Common Noun, since Kurios here governs the genitive sabbatou (Sabbath), as a Greek scholar says ; or as a Hebrew scholar would say, Kurios is here in the cofistruct state, with the noun sabbatou after it. Any Proper Noun introduced where Kurios here is, would only produce a vacancy of mean- ing and an outrage on grammar. You can try it : The Son of man is Abraham of the Sabbath, the Son of man is Moses of the Sabbath, the Son of man is David of the Sabbath ; or, if it is said, The Son of man is the Nehemiah of the Sabbath, a glimmering meaning may be discov- erable in the sentence, as that Jesus fills the place of Nehemiah in inau- gurating a reformation of Sabbath observance ; but neither this meaning nor any other can be introduced into this sentence except by bringing two persons under the term Nehemiah, or, in other words, ctianging it into a Common Noun. And precisely as the divine name Kurios in this saying of Jesus must be a Common Noun, so in every place where mX3i' nin\ Jehovah of hosts, occurs, the term Jehovah must be a Com- mon Noun. Aben Ezra has clearly unfolded the utter impossibility of its being, in this phrase, a DVi'n Dt^. The argument founded on the i>cot»)s (Godhead) ascribed to the Son of God is unfolded in the first chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews ; but this argument founded on the kupiottjs (Lordship) ascribed to him will certainly appear to many minds equally clear and forcible, and pos- sibly more extensively and inextricably woven through the vast and unspeakably holy texture of the Jewish Scriptures. I will invite the reader to notice in the foot-note on page 37 how Maimonides appears to insist that there is only one Proper Noun by which God is known — namely, the Tetragrammaton — whereas the name Jah is equally a Proper Noun, equally holy and incomprehensible and expressive of unchanging being. And this same, all of it, can be affirmed of the other name, Ehych usher Ehyeh, I-will-be-tliat-I-will-bc. APPENDIX. A DISSERTATION ON THE BOOK OF JOB. The book of Job has rendered such pecuhar and im- portant aid in the preceding inquiries that it is proposed finally to make it the subject of a special dissertation. The following verse is found in Ezekiel : "Though Noah, Daniel, and Job were in it, as I live, saith the Lord God, they shall deliver neither son nor daughter ; they shall but deliver their own souls by their righteousness" (chap. xiv. 20): — which verse proves that the Jews of the Babylonish captivity knew Job as one whose supplica- tions were needed by his friends for their salvation. If a verse is found in the book which is Chaldee, this does not prove that this verse must have been written so late as the captivity in Babylon ; since it might just as well be argued that Jacob and Laban lived close to the captivity because Chaldee words passed between them in their conversation as they were separating for the last time. Aben Ezra gives his opinion thus: ''Job was one of the grandsons of Nahor, the brother of Abraham ; and a view still more agreeable to me is that he was of the sons of Esau." Job could hardly be younger than fifty years when his great reverse came upon him ; and, as he lived one hundred 19* 221 22 2 A DISSERTATION ON JOB. and forty years afterward, he must have been nearly two hundred years old when he died. Men had ceased long before the time of Moses to live to this age ; and the book of Job was probably composed long before the first book of Moses. " The following instances will shovv the regularity of the decline, and enable us, with some degree of probability, to determine the period of the world in which Job lived. Noah lived nine hundred and fifty years ; Shem, his son, six hundred ; Arphaxad, his son, four hundred and thirty-eight years ; Salah, four hundred and thirty-three years; Eber, four hundred and sixty-four ; Peleg, two hundred and thirty-nine ; Reu, two hundred and thirty-nine ; Serug, two hundred and thirty ; Nahor, two hundred and forty-eight ; Terah, two hundred and five ; Abraham, one hundred and seventy-five; Isaac, one hundred and eighty ; Jacob, one hundred and forty-seven ; Joseph, one hundred and ten ; Moses, one hundred and twenty ; Joshua, one hundred and ten. Supposing, then, the age of Job to have been somewhat unusual and ex- traordinary, it would fall in with the period somewhere in the time between Terah and Jacob ; and, if so, he was probably contemporary with the most distinguished of the patriarchs." {Barnes.") It was the burnt-offering which Job sacrificed regularly for his children, on the hypothesis that they had sinned in their feasts; and it was the burnt-offering of fourteen animals which his three friends were required to provide in the end, that the sin of their improper language might be forgiven before the Lord in answer to the prayer of Job for them. This proves that the patriarchal burnt- offering was in large part of the nature of a sin-offering ; it also proves a probability that the sin-offering in that separate form which Moses gave it did not exist in the time of Job. A DISSERTATION OX JOB. 223 The Divine namey^/i is not found in Job, which favors the hypothesis that Moses was the first to bring it into use ; and Adonai, as a Divine name, occurs only once in the whole book, namely, in the last verse of the twenty- eighth chapter. Abraham used this name seven times in prayer, thus proving that it was then clothed with all its sacredness ; but the horizon surrounding Job was so dif- ferent that this name was barely beginning to touch the horizon with its light. Memory must again be refreshed with the verses in the sixth chapter of Exodus: "And God spake unto Moses, and said unto him, I am Jehovah. And I appeared unto Abraham, unto Isaac, and unto Jacob, by El Shaddai ; and by my x\2imt Jehovah was I not known to them." It is highly interesting to examine how these two patriarchal names, £1 and Shaddai, appear in Job. El goes ahead of every other Divine name in Job by a large majority ; it occurs in fifty-five places, while Shaddai occurs in thirty- one places. Many verses consist of two parallel lines, and El is in the first line while Shaddai corresponds to it in the second line. Some examples are the following : " Doth £1 pervert judgment? Or doth Shaddai pervert justice ?" (viii. 3.) " If thou wouldest seek unto £/ betimes, And make thy supphcation to Shaddai." (viii. 5.) " Surely I would speak to Shaddai, And I desire to reason with EL" (xiii. 3.) " For he stretcheth out his hand against El, And strengtheneth himself against Shaddai." (xv. 25.) " Who said unto El, Depart from us : And what can Shaddai do for them?" (xxii. 17.) " For El maketh my heart soft, And Shaddai troubleth me." (xxiii. 16.) " As El liveth, who hath taken away my judgment ; And Shaddai, who hath vexed my soul." (xxvii. 2.) 224 A DISSERTATION ON JOB. " This is the portion of a wicked man with E/, And the heritage of oppressors, which they shall receive of Shaddai." (xxvii. 13.) " The Spirit of El hath made me, And the breath oi Shaddai will give me life." (xxxiii. 4.) There are thirteen verses of this kind in Job, each having El in one line and Shaddai in the other. They furnish a splendid testimony that El and Shaddai were the holy names among the patriarchs. The tetragrammaton was also known to Job as it was to Abraham ; it fills thirty-two places in Job ; but it is a very singular fact that in the body of the book — that is, the poetical speeches — the tetragrammaton is found only once, and this is in the twelfth chapter, the ninth verse. All the other instances of its appearance are in the historical chapters at the beginning and closje of the book, and in the titles at the heads of chapters, giving the author of the next speech. Whether this proves that the histor- ical frame inclosing the poetical speeches was prepared in a later age, when the name Jehovah was in more common use than in the time when the speeches first came into existence, is probably a question which cannot be an- swered with certainty. It is certified that the tetragram- maton was known to the patriarchs Job and Abraham ; and the true view is that it took a new specific personal meaning with Moses which it never had before. Thus the holy names El and Shaddai appear with a most commanding prominence on the face of the book of Job ; and to them must be joined Eloah, a noun of the singular number, of which Elohim is the plural, and which occurs in forty-one places, while its plural form occurs in only seventeen places, and eleven of these are in the first two chapters, leaving only six for the remain- ing forty chapters. The remarkable state of things here A DISSERTATION ON JOB. 225 lies before us that El and Shaddai and Eloah are su- premely prominent in the book of Job, that they are almost banished from the books of Moses and the other parts of the Bible, — not entirely banished, and the word El maintains its ground better than the others, but, with some exception in its favor, the three are almost banished, — and Divine names of the plural form and plural import fill their places. Job is decidedly the best book of natural theology in the Bible. It introduces names of the plural number for the Deity very sparingly, and certainly does not introduce them on the ground that there is a glare of majesty in Elohim the plurality more than in Eloah the unity ; it in- vests both El and Shaddai with majesty the most holy and the most brilliant \ it makes very few references to miracles; the speakers carry on the most weighty and profound discussions in religion without references to a doctrine as certified by a miracle, or a precept as origi- nating from a miracle; and, all things considered, it is the best unitarian book in the Hebrew canon. If the wish is to find a unitarianism diametrically opposed to trini- tarianism, to find a genuine unitarian germ which grows up in an exclusive unity and which cannot have its de- velopment in the three spreading branches of trinitarian- ism. Job is the blooming field where this germ is likely to be found in preference to all other parts of the Bible. Trinitarianism would never have had any hold among Gentile nations if they had always made the man of Uz, who was one of themselves, their supreme guide, and had never turned their eyes on the man of Nazareth as if they must expect their salvation from the Jews. The characteristic and apparently anomalous feature in the book of Job is the manifest and complete failure in the answer which comes from the Lord at the close of K* 2 26 A DISSERTATION ON JOB. the book. Our minds may here revert to the time when a President of the United States died at Washington, and the funeral cortege occupied a special train of cars in conveying the remains to Springfield for interment. Behold what was solemnly moving on the iron track, the special train with the hangings of black on each car, and the heavy dark plumes, while the mourning family and the chief men of the government were the passengers within. Suppose that the mournful appearance and the slow and solemn movement had raised the question on the road, What causes yonder special train to be moving? and suppose that some one gave an elaborate and brilliant reply on the mysteries of heat, steam, and friction, point- ing particularly to the action of the heat on the boiler and. pipes, the generation of the steam, the expansive power of the steam in the cylinder forcing the inclosed piston from end to end and bringing every wheel into motion, the different valves which confine the steam in the cylinder and let it escape at the right moment, the apparatus for bringing the train to a stop almost instantly, and the peculiar feathers of the ostrich which enter into the plumes, — it is clear that all this, however interesting, would still not be the proper reply to the question. This may illustrate how manifestly the answer of the Lord to Job, at the close of the book, is not the proper answer to the great question of the book. The question which runs as a thread through all the book, holding all things together, is. How could the justice of God permit such heavy afflictions to come on such a good man as Job was ? The whole answer of the Lord is the expansion of such thoughts as these : Behold my wisdom and power displayed in ihe great work of creation, in the tracing of those lines according to which the earth was first formed, in the birth of the ocean, when darkness and A DISSERTATION ON JOB. 227 clouds were the garment thrown over it in the morning of its birth. Behold my power and wisdom in the floods of light that come on the earth in the morning and depart in the evening, in the mysteries of that lower world that lies beyond the gates of death, in the circle of constella- tions which the sun traverses every year, in the brilliant Orion of the winter, and the sweet Pleiades of the spring, and the stars of the north that never touch the horizon. Behold clouds, and rain, and snow, and hail, and torrents, and obedient lightnings, floods also, bursting out in the bottom of the ocean, all testifying to my power and wis- dom. The same incomprehensible power and wisdom are again revealed in the lion, in the raven, in the wild goats of the rock, in the wild deer of the forest, in the spirited wild ass, in the unicorn or rhinoceros, in the ostrich, in the war-horse, in the hawk, in the eagle, in that mighty creature found where land and sea meet, the behemoth or hippopotamus, and in that other mighty creature of the river, the leviathan or crocodile ; in the perfect independence of all help of man which most of these creatures enjoy in their self-protecting instincts, in their care or apathy towards their young, and in that wild felicity which rocks and deserts and the highest clouds cause to flow around them. Behold there my wisdom in- finite, and my power infinite ; and now let it be your feeling that your power is only weakness, and that your wisdom comes to nothing. All this is a reply of dazzling sublimity; but still not one ray of light is thrown on that dark question, why the excellent Job had been made the most miserable of all living men. Let all the stars be brought forward, let all the songs of the sons of God in the morning of creation bring their sublime sound to the ears of man, let all the movements of clouds and fires and floods appear, and let all these mentioned creatures and i 2 28 A DISSERTATION ON JOB. all other creatures be brought forward under the strongest light, they cannot answer the question why man, though he may be a friend of God, must be a child of woe. Let it not be branded as an irreverent decision if we must decide that the answer of the Lord was a transparent failure. As well might the expansive steam, the cylinder, the valves, the powerful engine, the rolling wheels, the dark ostrich plumes, be summoned to declare why the cars were transporting the lifeless body of the nation's magis- trate, with the sorrowing company. This whole reply to Job has the appearance of a failure from the fact that it has its greatest sublimity at the beginning, and its weakness gradually and regularly in- creases to the close. It begins among the stupendous events of creation, walks among the stars and clouds, and then descends among the birds ; touches the forest and the horse in the battle, and ends with the crocodile in the sea. The goodness of God may shine in the stars and clouds, but certainly the cruel and terrible croco- dile is one of the last animals to make the impression on man that God is merciful. The argument pursues a track where it sinks continually into greater weakness. Why must good men suffer terribly ? One may give the answer, that the godly and the ungodly in this world are like wheat and chaff on the threshing-floor : both must re- ceive together the same severe knocks, so that they may be finally separated, the chaff to be cast away, and the wheat to be preserved. Another may give the answer, that a very dismal road through this world brings out the beauty of that faith which never doubts that the Lord is merciful. Another may give the answer, that afflictions are disciplinary; they are the means of conducting men to a more spiritual and holy life in this world. Another may give the answer, that the greater the good man's loss A DISSERTATION ON JOB. 229 in this world, the richer will be his gain in the life after 'death. But the Lord here does not unfold either of these views, or any other view. The great question is evaded. The answer substitutes the sublimity of nature for the sublimity of such religious subjects ; and the moral sub- limity in the speeches of Job's friends disappears from it. Who has not been thrilled with the moral majesty of the last speech of Zophar, where he describes how the great- ness of the hypocrite may reach to heaven, but God will cut him down in a moment, and that the wicked man may have the most brilliant prosperity on the earth, but while he is sitting at his table with all his choice provisions before him, and all displays of wealth around him, his eyes beaming most gracefully through his golden specta- cles, suddenly the arrow of the Almighty cuts through his liver, and shows itself in his other side, where its point is dripping with his gall? But this principle, that pros- pering wickedness must end in a terrific fall, scarcely comes to view anywhere in the Lord's reply to Job. Or who has not admired the moral pictures in the speech of Elihu, and particularly his peculiar view that terrible calamities sometimes come on a man, his flesh departs, his bones lose almost all their covering and they are thrown into excruciating pain, his mind becomds be- wildered, his conscience echoes with terrible sounds, and his life is brought into the shadow of death, but all this is only one way in which God calls the man to himself, and all ends in blessings to the sufferer because his soul is snatched from the pit ? But such an explanation of the design of calamities has no place in the Lord's reply to Job. The moral aspects of Job's case were earnestly and brilliantly discussed by the friends, but the reply of the Lord leaves these aspects out entirely. This is one of 230 A DISSERTATION ON JOB. the mysteries of the book : it was the moral question that was brought before the Lord to be decided. The failure is still more clearly proved when the close of the book is collated with the beginning, or when the Lord's reply is compared with the narrative at the begin- ning of the book. The Lord's reply contained no true account of the origin and cause of Job's afflictions. Ac- cording to the statement at the beginning of the book, the afflictions of Job originated in a council of the sons of God in heaven, where the charge was made against Job that his worldly prosperity filled his heart, and that all his religion was nothing better than selfishness and hypocrisy ; and then Satan went forth with a grant of full power to bring every possible calamity on Job, short of the stroke of death itself, to try the genuineness of his religion. The Lord did not explain to Job that all his afflictions came directly from the hand of a dark, malig- nant, revengeful spirit, delighting in accusations and habitually distrusting all human sincerity ; but this was the only true explanation, and the reply without this explanation must be a failure. Supposing that the failure has been clearly set forth and must be admitted, I now advance to the position that this complete failure is the essential part of the plan of the book, and the true key for unlocking the whole, and that the su- preme excellence of the book has its centre here. 1 find it to be the object of the book to set forth two great lessons : I. The first great lesson of the book is that our world is not isolated, but is closely connected with a higher world ; the human race on earth are closely con- nected with the higher world of the sons of God, so that joys and sorrows come to us from their invisible hands. The affliction of Job originated in the council of the sons of God in heaven. There was a mighty invisible agent A DISSERTATION ON JOB. 231 which controlled the fire, lightning, tornado, robbery, and bloodshed, which swept everything from Job in one day. There was an invisible agent called Satan, that touched the body of Job with the most disagreeable and sickening eruptions and poured horrors into his soul. What occurs on earth cannot be understood except in the light of what is designed in heaven. When a man sinks down to the pit, cords from heaven may be letting him down. When a man ascends towards God, cords that are held by the hands of angels may be drawing him up. Mighty wheels are now going round, only the lower part of which can be seen from the earth, while the higher part is moving among the angels and invisible to us, and the celestial hand that turns them is invisible. All the subjects of the moral government of God are not on the face of the earth ; there are other and higher worlds of them, and all these worlds are in a sympathetic and directly co-operative connection with us, and the deep mysteries of this connection cannot now be fathomed. A similar idea runs through the religions of heathenism. Homer sings how the decree of Jupiter controlled all the transactions at Troy, from the quarrel of Agamemnon and Achilles to the death of Hector. He exhibits the Trojan war as going forward in subordination to the counsel and control of the gods. It was often a celestial hand that saved a hero when otherwise he must instantly have perished. Every religion had its peculiar ideas of invis- ible celestial beings that directed and controlled transac- tions on earth , and the ideas on this point indicated the purity or the degradation and superstition of each religion. 2. The second great lesson of the book is that the stupendous miracle of creation constitutes one volume, and the later miracles of God's grace constitute another volume ; and there are questions pertaining to man's 232 A DISSERTATION ON JOb!' afflictions in this life which God himself does not answer from the first volume, but which must receive the true answer from the volume that instructs us in the miracles of grace. The human soul needs to learn in both the school of nature and the school of faith ; and the school of nature alone^is utterly inadequate to educate it. A chief object of the book of Job is to illustrate the relations between these two schools, or to place the school of nature on its own proper ground and form an accurate sketch of that large and sublime field, the whole of which belongs to the school of faith. The wisdom and power of God constitute nearly the whole of the theological lesson that can be learned in the great school of nature. The sources of instruction in this school are innumerable. Behold here the wonders of the material and immaterial creation, and of growth, develop- ment, revolution, and catastrophe, through the wide realm of nature in countless ages ; and here behold the stars that have ceased to shine and the stars that now light up our sky, the stars that blaze along the sun's path through the year, and the other stars which never pause in their nightly march around their northern centre ; the light of sun and moon ; the rain ; the snow ; the hail ; the flashing clouds breaking up in thunders ; the eagle ; the lion ; the wild goat ; the unicorn ; the ostrich ; the horse ; the behemoth ; the crocodile ; and to these may be added that darkness that has an unlimited domain beyond the gate of death : all these come to man with wonderful instructions in the school of nature, and the longer he listens to their voice the more he feels that he can never penetrate all their mysteries. But still the infinite power of God and the infinite wisdom of God are nearly all that they teach in theology. Ask them why the best men often have the greatest amount of affliction, A DISSERTATION ON JOB. 233 while the wicked live in prosperity and joy ; and they have no answer to give. Ask them why Job, the best man in the world, was plunged into the deepest suffering of both body and mind ; and the only answer that they have is the Divine power infinite and the Divine wisdom infinite. All such questions must be taken from the school of nature, and transferred to the higher school of faith. If it is the question why God permits the wicked man to prosper and wield power as if he were the best man, while the good man must live in deep sorrow as if he were the least worthy of God's notice ; or if it is the question why the worst man is permitted to die in peace and honor, while the .good man dies in terror and dis- honor ; or, what are the relations between mankind and a higher world of-worshiping beings where there is neither sin nor death ? or, what are the relations between human souls still living in the body and the human souls that have passed beyond the gate of death ? or, what is that atonement in blood whiclf really covers sin from the sight of God ? or, how may man attain to perfect peace with God ? or, does the gate of death open into a world of unmitigated darkness, or has a light arisen in that world ? or if the question is how man could be originally a holy being as he came from the hand of God, and then ever change into such a being as a malignant blasphemer of the holy name ; or if the simple question is how such a good man as Job could come to curse the day of his birth, — it is clear that all such questions cannot be touched in the school of nature, but must go up to the higher school of faith. The Lord himself, teaching in the school of nature, gave Job no satisfaction on any one of these c^uestions, but from all the high and low ranges of nature, from the stars over the head and the leviathan at the feet of man, the only answer was that no one can 20* 234 A DISSERTATION ON JOB. comprehend God's power and no one can comprehend his wisdom. The holiness of God, the principles of his moral government, his purposes presiding over the moral confusion and woes that fill the earth, and the final results of a life of religion and a life of wickedness, must be learned in the school of fiiith, or they must remain in confusion and uncertainty. This faith must have a special revelation from God for its foundation, otherwise it has nothing to rest on ; and hence the complete failure in the Lord's reply to Job to place the great question in a clear light was designed to exhibit the wide and tremendous vacancy which a Divine revelation comes to fill. This places the book of Job in a most interesting relation to the other books of the in- spired canon. It exhibits the yawning, terrific chasm; the other books build up the walls of eternal strength in this chasm. It exhibits the questions which the school of nature utterly fails to answer, and even fails in the name of the Lord himself to answer. The other books furnish that special infallible revelation from heaven in which the true answers to these questions are found. The three friends of Job were guilty before God because they had attempted to decide, at the presumptuous tribunal of their own reason, those questions which a supernatural revela- tion has come into the world to decide ; and they were required to offer sacrifices for their sin. Job also ab- horred himself and repented in dust and ashes, because he, though lese guilty than they, had attempted to explain things beyond his reach. This book exhibits the awfulness of the darkness of nature; the other books of Holy Scripture emit the new light which is above nature. It proves how very little theological light we have if we are left to the one stu- pendous miracle of creation ; the other books make us A DISSERTATION ON JOB. 235 acquainted with the later miracles of God's grace in the lives of Abraham, Moses, and many other prophets. Job is the outer court of the Gentiles, but the other parts of the Bible are the inner courts, close to the holy temple, where the true worshipers come nearest to God. It may also be a part of the design of this book to teach us that the power of God and the wisdom of God are never to be doubted ; and so, whatever difficulties we may find in the introduction of sin into our world, and the permission of its continued existence, we must always abhor every theory which can suppose any deficiency in either the power of God, or his wisdom, or his goodness. QUESTIONS DESIGNED TO ASSIST IN THE STUDY OF THE FOREGOING LETTERS. LETTER I. In what light did the Christian community appear be- fore the eyes of Maimonides ? Are Christians willing to be ranked among the heathen, without the privilege of making a defense ? Does the verse (Deut. vi. 4) "Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord," pass among the Jews as the most holy and weighty in the Bible ? Is it their watchword, and is it called the Shemah Yisrael ? Mention how a rabbi in a synagogue in Jerusalem used this watchword to turn all eyes in scorn on a Chris- tian missionary who had just entered. How often does the tetragrammaton occur in this verse? As it is never read aloud by strict Jews, what is the word substituted for it ? Is Adonat, then, always heard twice in the reading of this verse ? How often is the Divine name Adonai found in all the Bible? Is it properly a noun of the plural number? Does Adon mean Lord ? Does Adoni mean My Lord, as in Ps. ex. i ? 236 QUESTIONS. 237 Does Adonai, the Divine name, mean My Lords, or Lords ? Commencing our search from the beginning of the Bible, with whom do we find the Divine name Adonai first in use ? How often is it found as a word used by Abraham ? Is it found first in the fifteenth chapter of Genesis? How often does it occur in this chapter? Does this chapter contain the account of the covenant made with Abraham by passing between the pieces of sacrificed animals? How did the passing between the pieces indicate the establishment of a covenant ? Did God, in that covenant, reveal his presence in three forms : first, the horrible darkness ; secondly, the smoking furnace, passing between the pieces to accept the sacri- fices ; and thirdly, the burning lamp? Does the Lord dwell in the thick darkness ? Can a special signification be given to the smoking furnace ? Can a special signification be given to the burning lamp as the illuminator? What chapter of Genesis contains the third place where Adonai is found in the Bible ? When that rabbi in Jerusalem was proclaiming the Shcmah Yisrael, to cause the missionary to feel ashamed, is it probable that he had the verses of the eighteenth chapter of Genesis in his mind, "And Jehovah appeared to him in the plains of Mamre : and he sat in the tent door in the heat of the day. And he lifted up his eyes, and looked, and lo, three men stood by him : and when he saw, he ran to meet them from the tent door, and bowed himself toward the ground, and said, Adonai, if now I have found favor in thine eyes;" — and that it 238 QUESTIONS. could occur to him that Adonai here stands for three persons as well as for a Unity ? Does Aben Ezra appear to take this Adonai in the secular meaning, and not in the Divine meaning ? If he does, does the Talmud agree with him ? Does Onkelos agree with him ? Does the law for the scribes of the Pentateuch agree with hiin ? Does the Masoretic pointing agree with him ? After Abraham had thus addressed the three as Adonai, how often did he again use this holy word in his conver- sation with them in the same afternoon ? Did Abraham ever mention Adonai except in prayer? . When Lot addressed the two angels that same evening with the secular Adonai, is it still clearly of the plural number ? When Lot, the next morning, uttered the holy Adonai in prayer, was it clearly a plural word ? Does Jonathan ben Uzziel deserve censure for marring the text in making it read that Lot said to him, Adonai, whereas the original text is that Lot said to them, Adonai? May not both the Almighty and created angels be united in the word Adonai to give it its plurality ? When Moses prayed that Adonai might go up with the people through the wilderness, had he any reference to any created angel ? When Adonai appeared in vision to Isaiah, is there any probability that any of the seraphim, or any created beings, entered into the word along with the Creator to be the foundation of its plurality ? When Daniel repeated Adonai so often in his one great prayer, is there any possibility that he found both the Creator and created beings in the word, and accepted this as the explanation of its plurality ? QUESTIONS. 239 When the word occurs fourteen times in the Lamenta- tions of Jeremiah, does anything look like ajunion of the Creator and any created beings to account for its plurality? Does Adonai, therefore, look like a coin coming new and glittering from the mint of Abraham and stamped with a triad on its face ? What might be suspected or feared concerning an Adonai purporting to be a coin from the mint of Abra- ham, but with no trace of the triad on its face ? What has Jesus taught concerning the Shcmah Yisracl, in Mark xii. 29 ? LETTER IL Having dismissed the term Adonai, when we take up the tetragrammaton are we now commencing with the terms found in the original text ? How often is the tetragrammaton found in the original text, the Shemah Yisrael ? Is the tetragrammaton ever applied to any person that is not included in the Eternal Being ? If there is a plurality in it, must this plurality be within the Deity ? Is the tetragrammaton inflexibly of the singular num- ber? Is the word Jehovah ever found in the plural ? Is the phrase Holy Gods, with this singular feature, that the adjective holy is plural as well as the noun, ever an- nexed to Jehovah, to fill the place of a definition of the term ? Where does this occur ? Give an etymological analysis of the tetragrammaton. The future time, where does it stand ? The past time, where does it stand ? 240 QUESTIONS. The present time, where does it stand ? May that verse in the New Testament, " No man hath seen God at any time ; the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him," be illustrated by the present moment, which, though so transient and limited, represents all the infinite past and is equal in worth to all the past ? ■Does the infinite future depend on the transient present and the changeless past ? If one asks the question why four persons might not be in the Trinity as well as three, might it as well be asked why we have three times, the infinite future, the present, and the infinite past, and cannot add a fourth time ? Do the three times in the tetragrammaton furnish three personal names designating the Eternal Essence ? What separate personal name does the future tense in the tetragrammaton furnish ? To whom was the name I-will-be-that-I-will-be first made known ? Can this name be shared by any created being in con- junction with God ? Does the Holy Ghost appear to have his office especially in the infinite future ? What separate personal name does the past tense in the tetragrammaton furnish ? Where is the name Jah first found in the Bible? Where is the oath involving perpetual war against Amalek mentioned as being made with the hand on the throne of Jah ? Mention some of the ways in which the great work of creation has been connected with the name Jah. In what book does the verse occur, "Extol him who rideth upon the heavens by his name JAH " ? QUESTIONS. 241 Is the essential idea of the name Jah, God before all, or God the eternal rock of strength ? What separate personal name does the present tense in the tetragrammaton furnish? Did Moses receive the tetragrammaton with a new meaning which the patriarchs had not known, though they were all acquainted with the word ? When the Lord gave his name to Moses at the rock of Horeb, after the worship of the golden idol, and pro- claimed "Jehovah, Jehovah, God, merciful," etc., does it appear the most consistent interpretation that the first Jehovah was the patriarchal, and the second was the one newly reveal6l to Moses? Does this new Mosaic tetragrammaton appear to hold his place in the interjacent present tense, as I-will-be-that- I-will-be has a place in the infinite future, and Jah has a place in the infinite past ? Does this newly-revealed tetragrammaton, with the I-will-be-that-I-will-be and the Jah, make the complete Trinity? Is the ineffable name uniformly translated in the Septuagint and the New Testament by the word Kurios (Lord) ? Is Jesus often called Lord {Kurios) in the New Testa- ment ? Did Jesus take to himself the name Lord ? Was prayer ever made to him as being Lord ? Can you give six instances in the New Testament where Jesus is called Lord ? If the term Lord, which Jesus assumed, was the trans- lation of the ineffable name, must it be referred to the new tetragrammaton which was revealed to Moses, rather than to the patriarchal tetragrammaton ? As this new interjacent tetragrammaton was limited on 242 QUESTIONS. one hand by Ehyeh ashcr Ehyeh, and on the other hand by Jah, is the Lord Jesus likewise limited on the one hand by the Holy Spirit, and on the other hand by the Father ? Since Pharaoh attributed the perfect knowledge of the future to the Spirit of God, does this prove that there is a special propriety in assigning the term I-will-be-that-I- will-be to the Holy Spirit ? Do the terms Jah, in Mosaic theology, and Father of the Lord Jesus, in Christian theology, appear equally to point back into the infinite past ? Is the tetragrammaton the proper name for God, and does it stand for his essence, his eternal life, and not grow out of any particular attribute or work? Is it also proved from the time of Moses to be an appel- lative as well as a proper noun? Does the phrase Jehovah of hosts, according to the principles of the Hebrew language, prove the appellative character of the tetragrammaton ? Why was the most holy name, the exclusive and essen- tial name of God, permitted to make a transition into the character of an appellative, and still, as an appellative, retaining all its original holiness? Did the word lose so much as the least share of its original strength in passing into the character of an appellative ? Is the word Kiirios (Lord), which translates it, clearly an appellative ? Explain how we find Kiu-ios to be an appellative in the New Testament where it is also the Divine name. Explain how Kurios is an appellative in the first verse of the Epistle of James. If the appellative character of the tetragrammaton and the appellative character of Kurios are proved to be per- QUESTIONS. 243 fectly the same, does this raise an insurmountable diffi- cuhy in the way of unitarianism ? Does a truly consistent unitarianism demand that the tetragrammaton preserve its strict, substantive, individual, untransferable import, even more so than the term God Almighty, and never assume one of the features of a common noun ? Does Jehovah, as an appellative, begin to spread over the field of inspiration about the time of David, and come to abound wonderfully in the last prophets of the Jewish canon, as if it has taken the whole field? Does it bloom more thickly in Zechariah, Haggai, and Malachi than in all the earlier parts of Scripture ? Are its blooms more numerous in Malachi, over the same space, than in all other parts of the Hebrew canon ? Does this increasing abundance of the tetragrammaton in its appellative character look like the morning star of a new dispensation ? LETTER III. If the appellative import of the tetragrammaton is the Upholder of the intclUge)it hosts of the universe by a constant viiracle, does this likewise define the term Son of God, in the New Testament ? Does John testify that the glory of Jesus, in his life of miraculous beneficence, was the glory of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth ? Did Jesus, in the possession of a true body and a reason- able soul, exist in eternity? If he did not possess his human body and soul in eternity, does it follow that as the son of David he began to exist in time, like any other son of David ? Is it the orthodox Christian theology that Jesus as the 244 QUESTIONS. son of David belongs to time, but that as the only begotten of the Father he belongs to eternity ? Did the Son of God, belonging to eternity, take, at a certain point in time, a true human body and a true human soul to himself in a union that should last always? Is this the orthodox doctrine? In this indissoluble union, did either humanity change into Deity or Deity change into humanity? was there any mixture of the two natures so as to affect the essential properties of either ? Would any theory involving such a mixture be counted a great error in theology ? What was the meaning when Jesus was called on in the wilderness, as the Son of God, to change the stones into bread ? Why was it suggested to him that, being the Son of God, he could not be destroyed by a fall from the pin- nacle of the temple? Did the first attack that was ever made on the Messiah- ship of Jesus consist in a doubt thrown on the title Son of God ? How did Jesus defend his right to work on the sabbath day? When he called God his Father, did the Jews under- stand him as making himself equal to God ? Explain that remarkable saying, " Before Abraham was, lam." Does this remarkable saying place the Son of God where the present tense is, in the centre of the tetra- grammaton, if the saying can be proved to be truthful? What is the highest jiroof that Jesus is the Son of God? If the resurrection from the dead did occur, must it have been a miracle? QUESTIONS. 245 Was it such a miracle as only omnipotence could work? Does omnipotence ever give its hand to help anything that is not true ? Is the whole Christian faith either true or false accord- ing to the truth or want of truth in the story of the resur- rection ? Were the witnesses of the resurrection numbered by hundreds? Did he appear to his disciples alive, at different times and in different places, after he had died on the cross ? Is it possible that his resurrection was not true, and that the disciples did not know that it was not true ? Could the report of his resurrection on the third day be first started at the Pentecost seven weeks after his cruci- fixion, and then be believed by any person ? Was it possible that the disciples stole him away from the sepulchre and their tracks could not be followed ? Was the full moon shining all the night ? How could the disciples, even if they were the most artful deceivers, hope to make an imperishable name for themselves by the possession of his dead body ? Is it probable that it ever once occurred to them to re- move his body from the sepulchre ? Why could not the dead body be found by either friend or foe after Sunday morning? Why did not the Pharisees exhibit the dead body before witnesses, and thus hush effectually the false story ? LETTER IV. What is the other Divine name joined with the tetra- grammaton in the text at the head of this book, the watchword of Israel ? 246 QUESTIONS. Is Elohhn (God) properly of the plural number ? Is Eloah the noun in the singular number of which it is the plural ? Are there a few texts in which an adjective in the plural number, or a verb in the plural number, is found agreeing with Elohim? How many times does Elohim occur in the first chapter of Genesis ? How many times does Eloah occur in all the five books of Moses ? Is it in the same chapter, the thirty-second of Deuter- onomy, where Eloah occurs twice? Are the Divine names Eloah and El, and Shaddai and El Shaddai, names concerning which there can be no question that they are of the singular number ? Are they the most suitable names to express the unita- rian idea of God ? Did Moses find these names of the singular number, as possessing a supreme lustre among the patriarchs? and did he deprive them of their supremacy and put other names of unquestionable plurality in their place ? How often is Eloah found in the book of Job? How often is El found in the oracles of Balaam ? How often is ^/ found in the book of Job? How often is Shaddai found in the book of Job? How many verses are there in Job consisting of two parallel clauses, in which one clause contains El, and the other clause Shaddai, corresponding to it? What are the facts showing that Moses completely banished the word Shaddai from the proper Mosaic theo- logical vocabulary, and sent the word El a good part of the way along with it ? Is there any term which is more decidedly a proper name for God, and more clearly expressive of his unity, QUESTIONS. 247 and more unchangeable in its meaning, and more repug- nant to all plurality, than the term Shaddai? Would unitarianism have been more favored if Moses had retained these Divine names, and especially Shaddai, in their patriarchal popularity, and not changed them for other names of the plural number ? In those verses of Scripture where the unity and su- premacy of God are placed in the sharpest antagonism to all polytheism, are the Divine names which are made most prominent, of the plural number ? In the expressions God of gods and Lord of lords, is the first word God found in the Hebrew to be plural as well as the second, and the first word Lord found to be plural as well as the second ? How will it do to compare the Divine plurality in the phraseology of Moses with the Divine plurality in the following language of John, the last prophet of the New Testament ? — "Grace be unto you, and peace, from him which is, and which was, and which is to come ; and from the seven Spirits which are before his throne ; ''And from Jesus Christ, who is the faithful witness, and the first begotten of the dead, and the prince of the kings of the earth. Unto him that loved us, and washed us from our sins in his own blood, "And hath made us kings and priests unto God and his Father." LETTER V. May the difference between the trinitarian and the unitarian interpretation of the Shemah Yisrael be illus- trated by the difference between E phiribus unum (more making one) and Ex uno uniim (one making one) ? 248 ' QUESTIONS. Does the Trinitarian find the essential value of this text in its intrinsic truth, while the Unitarian finds its essential value in its extrinsic truth or its antagonism to idolatry ? Does the public life of Jesus commence with the Trinity revealed at his baptism, and close with the Trinity intro- duced into the form of baptism for all nations ? Does the prophet Zechariah teach us concerning, first, the Lord who brings forth his servant the Branch; secondly, the Branch or the stone which the Lord en- graves with seven eyes, which are his own eyes ; and thirdly, the Spirit of the Lord ? Does Ezekiel teach us concerning, first, the Lord ; secondly, David, who will be the king of Israel forever ; and thirdly, the Holy Spirit ? Does Isaiah teach us concerning, first, the Lord ; secondly, the Branch of David ; and thirdly, the Spirit of the Lord, who will rest on this Branch ? What are the titles given to this Branch of David in Isaiah ix. 6, 7 ? What is the dignity of the throne of David as exhibited in this ninth chapter of Isaiah ? Mention the three parts in the benediction which was given to the priests to be pronounced on the congregation of Israel. Were these three benedictions essentially one benedic- tion ? Did the one benediction separate itself into three, and did the three unite in one ? May the benediction, therefore, which the people re- ceived from Aaron's sons, be called the triune benediction? Has unitarianism gone forth to the world from Arabia rather than from Judea ? Has Mohammed been the greatest prophet of unita- rianism that has ever risen in the world ? QUESTIONS. 249 Are more than one hundred millions at this day his most rigidly unitarian disciples? Is the ring of unitarianism more clear in the Koran than in either the Jewish or the Christian Scriptures ? Could the temple of Solomon ever stand more firmly on unitarian ground than the mosque of Omar has been standing for a thousand years? If Ishmael was that son of Abraham in whom all the families of the earth were to be blessed, and if this prom- ised blessing has already come, has it come in unita- rianism ? If Isaac was that son of Abraham in whom all the fami- lies of the earth were to be blessed, and if this promised blessing has already come, must it be in trinitarianism as taught in the New Testament ? Is the mosque of Omar a heathen institution ? Does the Lord who dwelt between the cherubim recog- nize the worship in that mosque as having been appointed by himself? Is Arabia, even if all its sands were changed into gold, equal to Judea ? Does the Koran teach the miraculous conception of Jesus, while it inculcates the most decided rejection of the doctrine of the Trinity ? Does it enjoin a high respect for Jesus as the son of Mary by a miracle, while it condemns in the strongest language the tenet that Jesus is the Son of God ? Do some Unitarians of our country admit that Jesus was the son of David by a miracle, while they deny the Son of God ? and ought these two points always to be kept separate in the discussion of the subject, as they are kept separate in the Koran ? 250 QUESTIONS. LETTER VI. What distinction docs Aben Ezra make between Ehyeh asher Ehyeh and Jehovah ? Repeat the admirable text which Aben Ezra supplies for a discourse on the Trinity. Why does Aben Ezra mark each of these three names as a slum hd'etsem, name of the essence, proper noun ? and what is his distinction between such a noun and an appellative? Does heathenism exhibit a characteristic consistency in transferring a trinity to the head of the serpent? What is your success in finding the biblical Trinity among the gods and goddesses of Greece ? Or in finding it in ancient Egypt ? Or in finding it in the Hindoo system? Refer to some texts proving that faith finds the im- movable foundation on which it rests, in Jah. Refer to some texts proving that hope finds its guiding luminary in Ehyeh asher Ehyeh, I-ivill-be-that-I-will-bc. Will you illustrate the dismal chasm in religion, if it consists of faith and hope, without love in the centre? How would you illustrate the chasm in Jewish theology if it holds to Jah and Ehyeh asher Ehyeh, and leaves out the Beloved from the centre ? What is taught in the Pentateuch concerning the Be- loved ? In the prophetical books? In the Hagiographa? Repeat some verses from the New Testament showing that the Father, as the foundation of faith, is the same with Jah. Repeat some verses from the New Testament showing QUESTIONS. 251 that the Holy Ghost, as the guiding luminary of our hope, is the same as Ehyeh asher Ehyeh. Repeat some verses from the New Testament confirma- tory of the view that Jesus and the Beloved of Pentateuch, prophets, and Hagiographa are the same Divine person. Is the work of the Son of God, in one sense, a finished work in the sinner's justification, while the work of the Holy Ghost lies in the future ? What are your views of that love which unites our souls to the Beloved ? How is it distinguished from all those kinds of love which belong to the ordinary development of our selfish nature ? What outward fruit does this holy love produce ? Should Christianity be condemned, because idolatry and prayers to the Virgin, and tyranny, have had a place in the Church of Rome ? LETTER VII. In the Epistle to the Hebrews is the first Divine name that occurs the Greek word Theos (God) ? Is this word of the singular number and appropriated to the one living and true God, like the word God in the English Bible ? Would its plural be as inadmissible in the first verse of this epistle as the word Gods would be in the English Bible? Does its plural stand for false deities, very much as our God means the one living and true God, but the plural, gods, stands for false deities ? Is the second Divine name in this epistle found to be "Son of God"? 252 QUESTIONS. What are the other denominations annexed to the Son of God ? That the Messiah as the Son of God is superior to the angels as the sons of God, — does the epistle undertake to prove this point ? That the Messiah as Elohim or God is superior to the angels who also are called Elohim, — does the epistle undertake to prove this point? How many quotations from the Old Testament are wrought into the argument of the first chapter of this epistle ? How many of these seven quotations are applied to the Messiah ? How many are applied to the angels? How many are applied to God the Creator? What is the first quoted v'erse applied to the Messiah, and where is it found ? What is the second quoted verse applied to the Mes- siah, and where is it found ? What is the third quoted verse applied to the Messiah, and where is it found? What is the fourth quoted verse applied to the Messiah, and where is it found ? What is the first verse which points to the place which angels fill^ and where is it found ? What is the second verse which points to the place which angels fill, and where is it found ? What is the remaining quoted verse which brings to view God the Creator, and where is its place in the Old Testament ? Can the idea be found in the Septuagint of the Son of God whose son^Jiip was earlier than the womb whence the morning star has come? Is the Messiah sometimes a complex person in the QUESTIONS. 253 Bible, standing for both the greatest one among the sons of David and other sons of David with him ? Does the Messiah present this complex form in the chapter of the second book of Samuel which contains the verse, "I will be to him a father, and he shall be to me a son" ? Is the serpent that received the malediction from the Lord in the garden a similar complex person ? does that malediction fall on the original and morally responsible liar and on animals nominally associated with him? Where it is said that Solomon should sit on an ever- lasting throne, does the epithet everlasting belong to it only as being the throne of the Messiah ? If Solomon is separated from the Messiah, has his throne fallen as completely as the throne of the Caesars ? Where is it declared that the throne of the Messiah will last for eve.r and ever ? Will the heavens themselves perish, and be rolled together like a scroll and be cast away as useless ? Will the throne of the Messiah perish, or be rolled together like a scroll and be cast away as useless ? Is the throne of the Messiah, therefore, above the heavens ? Are the four quotations referring to the Messiah the centre of the argument in this chapter? and do the two quotations referring to the angels stand on one side, and is the quotation referring to God the Father placed on the other side, to send forth light from the opposite sides on the central argument ? Is the testimony concerning the Messiah strengthened by what is said on one side concerning the angels, and by what is said on the other side concerning the Creator ? W^hat definition is given of the baptismal order of the Trinity and the tetragrammatic order? 254 QUESTIONS. Is the Son of God the centre in each order? Give some instances in the New Testament where the order is the tetragrammatic, — that is, the Holy Ghost, Ehyeh asher Ehyeh, is placed first, the Son of God, Jehovah, fills the centre, and the Father, Jah, is placed last. Describe the impressive instance of this in the first chapter of Revelation. Describe how the tetragrammatic order is imprinted on the whole face of the Revelation : first, the Holy Ghost being prominent in the epistles to the seven churches ; secondly, the Lamb appearing at the opening of all the seven seals ; and thirdly, the angel's oath at the end of time being in the name of Him who hath created all things, and Jah being the word so prominent in the triumphing voices of the angels over the overthrow of the hosts of enemies, the smoke of whose torment ascendeth up for ever and ever. LETTER VIIL Was the Epistle to the Hebrews written while the Jew- ish worship still existed at the temple ? Does the name Son of God, in this epistle, denote an office or an honor which the Messiah has received, or does it occur as a name naturally belonging to him? What are the two texts found in the Psalms which sup- ply the foundation for the whole epistle ? If the view of Jesus as the high priest is found correct, must the view of Jesus as the Son of God be accepted with it ? If the epistle is inspired, must its view of the Son of God be received as the true view? Does it purport to be the exponent of ancient Judaism? Does it interpret that rest into which God entered at QUESTIONS. 255 the end of the six days of creation as being the same holy rest into which believers now enter? Does a danger exist now that the oath of the Lord may shut us out of his rest ? How is Melchizedek interpreted as a type of the Mes- siah ? Does the oath of the Lord make the Messiah a priest forever after the order of Melchizedek ? Is there any event in the life of David, or in the lives of any of his sons, except the Messiah, in which the sublime oath of the Lord can be found, that he should be a priest forever, after the order of Melchizedek ? Were the priests in the tribe of Levi, and not in the tribe of Judah to which David belonged ? Does a priest established by the oath of the Lord, and according to the order of Melchizedek, evidently mean a priest of the highest dignity? Can you describe the doings of the high priest on the annual day of atonement, the only day in the year when the high priest entered into the holy of holies? Could he enter there on that day without blood ? Was the blood of the sin-offering the only blood that could be carried into the holy of holies? Had the high priest, on this great day of atonement, one sin-offering for himself and another sin-offering for the people? Was the blood of both these sin-offerings carried into the holy of holies and sprinkled directly in front of the mercy-seat ? What was the number of the motions of the high priest's finger in sprinkling the blood of these two sin-offerings in the holy of holies? Was the same blood also sprinkled on the holy veil on the side next to the door of the tabernacle? 256 QUESTIONS. Was the golden altar sprinkled seven times with blood, at the same time? Was one-half of the sin-offering for the people sent away, as a living goat, into the wilderness? What were the lines separating the sin-offering, the burnt-offering, and the peace-offering? Was the sin-offering eminently the Mosaic oblation ? Did the burnt-offering exist among the patriarchs ? Is the burnt-offering the only one mentioned in Job? How does the Christian find the sin-offering in Jesus? How does he find the burnt-offering ? How does he find the peace-offering ? Has he one high priest in the place of the many high priests of the tribe of Levi ? Has he one oblation in the place of the many oblations on the Jewish altar ? Has he one perfect atonement in the place of the thou- sands of shadowy atonements by blood, from the time of Moses to the time of the Herods ? Does Jesus live perpetually as high priest ? Was the Messiah the heir of the Jewish church ? Has Jesus appointed his disciples the heirs of an ever- lasting kingdom ? Was there ever one year while either the tabernacle or the temple was standing, when repentance and tears, fast- ing, confession, prayer, reformation, and help for the poor made the atonement for sin without any shedding of blood ? Was it a settled principle in the Jewish church that the essence of the atonement was in the blood? Was there scarcely any remission of sin or any sin- offering without blood ? What prophet speaks of a new covenant which should QUESTIONS. 257 take the place of the old covenant that was made with the people as they were coming from Egypt ? What psalm speaks of sin-offerings and burnt-offerings as laid aside, and the execution of the will of God as sup- plying their place? Must the sanctification of the people of God now be sought in this executed will of God by means of the body that has been prepared, rather than in the oblation of animals as sin-offerings and burnt-offerings? How is faith defined in the eleventh chapter? Are the patriarchs seen in this epistle as earnest seekers of a blessed immortality ? What is the Mount Zion of which the Christian be- lieves himself to be a citizen? What is the character of that faith which makes the restoration of the literal Jerusalem the principal object of its hopeful vision ? What is the significance of the fact that the Epistle to the Hebrews was written when the destruction of Jeru- salem was seen to be close at hand, yet no mention is made of a restoration ? Is the failure of the restoration a remarkable part of the history of Julian the Apostate? Where was the epistle written ? How does its view of the Mosaic institutions differ from the elucidation of the same subject by Josephus, written in Rome several years afterwards? Is it the sublimer view of the Mosaic ritual that it was a prophecy awaiting a fulfillment in a distant age ? and is this view more likely to be the true view? How and where is the Christian directed to find in the tabernacle of Moses an outline of good and great things to come, and in the actual worship a delineation ? 258 QUESTIONS. LETTER IX. In a general review of this discussion, what must be mentioned as the first argument ? The second argument? The third argument ? The fourth argument ? The fifth argument ? The sixth argument ? The seventh argument? The eighth argument? The ninth argument? The tenth argument ? Tlie eleventh argument ? The twelfth argument ? The thirteenth argument? How is the objection met that the plural Divine names are \\\q plm-als of majesty ? Or the objection that the doctrine of the Trinity con- tradicts reason ? Or the objection that the doctrine has no analogy in nature ? Or the objection that the day is promised when Jehovah will be one and his name one? LETTER X. Is the Spirit of God ever found to be an agent com- pletely subduing the human spirit, subverting the wicked will of man, displacing reason and substituting a high order of insanity, compelling the tongue to utter things which the will had determined not to utter, suspending QUESTIONS. 259 the external senses and removing all consciousness of the condition of the prostrate body ? What works are ascribed to the Spirit of God ? Must the Spirit of the Lord and the word of the Lord stand as capital parts in the confession of faith for Judaism ? Must the Spirit of the Lord and the word of the Lord be united in the creed of the seed of Israel and the seed's seed of Israel, forever ? Does the Spirit of the Lord, without the word or the Scriptures, make Judaism a kind of heathenish fanaticism ? Does the written and read word of the Lord, without the Spirit, make Judaism the most grotesque rationalism ? Is the honest inquiry after Divine and holy truth im- possible except where the Spirit of God diffuses his influ- ence on the heart ? Shall tradition be substituted for the Holy Spirit as an interpreter of the Scriptures ? Shall the church be substituted for the Holy Spirit as the spiritual guide ? Shall an infallible pope be substituted for the Holy Spirit as the guide to heaven? Can human reason be permitted to occupy the place of the Holy Spirit? Are all doubters, and especially the most bewildered, encouraged to pray that the Holy Spirit may bring them a light to lead them out of darkness ? What is the name of the great prophet whose heart glowed with the wish that all the Lord's people were prophets, and " that the Lord would put his spirit upon them"? 26o QUESTIONS. APPENDIX. State some evidences of the patriarchal antiquity of the book of Job. Did the answer of the Lord to Job from the whirlwind fail to give the true reason of the afflictions of Job ? What are we especially taught by this failure ? Does the book of Job demonstrate the need of a super- natural revelation ? Might it have been added to the enumeration, as the fifteenth argument, that if the heathen had made the man of Uz their supreme and infallible guide, and his book their most holy book, in the time prior to Mohammed, they would have had the best guide to a pure unitarian religion ? and that they learned the trinitarian doctrine only by turning away from Arabia to Judea and Nazareth, and by saying to the Jews, We will follow you, for we know that God is with you ? WE PASS AWAY! It was some months after the manuscript of the pre- ceding volume had gone into the publishers' hands, when, on Saturday, July 26, 1873, I received the Israelite, of Cincinnati, and found the following : "Rev. Dr. Aaron Guinzburg (Guenzburg) died Saturday last, at his residence in Boston, surrounded by his family and friends. He was truly a good man. In all relations of public life, as a public man, a rabbi, a father, a spouse, or a neighbor, this one beautiful feature of genuine good- ness endeared him to everybody, and makes his loss so much more grievous to all who have known him." Accordingly, those hands are now in the grave which were supposed to be among the first that would receive this volume from the press. It is probable that if he bad seen this volume he would have wished it to be known to the public that the proposition to hold this discussion with me did not originate with him. His able articles under the title " The Morality of Christiajiity compared with that of Judaisni'^ had been published. This was followed by some letters passing between us through the newspapers, without any special reference to controverted points. Finally, I proposed that each of us should write a certain number of letters on imitarianism, to be published in two prominent newspapers, one Jewish and the other Chris- tian. Whether, if he had lived to see this volume, it would have been his wish to give the public a similar volume of 261 262 ^V£ PASS AlVAY. letters on the other side of the question, is a question on which I am not able to form an opinion. I append two notices of his death, from Jewish papers : From '■'■The yewish ]\Iessenger.'''' Rev. Dr. A. Guinzburg, for the last few years of Bos- ton, Mass., and lately of Rochester, N. Y., died in the former city on Sunday last, in the sixty-first year of his age. Dr. Guinzburg was a native of Prague, Bohemia, and from his earliest youth dedicated his life to the study of the Talmud and Hebrew lore, without neglecting modern sciences. After he had officiated as rabbi and preacher for some years at Libochowitz, Bohemia, he came to this country in the year 1849, and soon after his arrival received a call as minister of a congregation at Baltimore. He was at one time a professor in the New- ton University and Maryland Institute of Baltimore. During the war he changed his residence for Rochester, where he was highly esteemed as a minister. His last years he spent in private, not, however, without taking the liveliest interest in all Jewish affairs; and at the time of his death he was president of the Warren Street Synagogue at Boston. Always alive to the welfare of Judaism, he used his poweriil pen against any attack on his religion or nation, and was a diligent contributor to the Jewish press. Many abusers of the Jewish religion have found Jn him an able opponent, who would never rest when a de- fense of his principles was thought necessary. He enjoyed the higliest esteem of all who knew him, and a large cir- cle of friends lament his early demise. He had also been for many years connected with the Free Masons and Odd- Fellows. Rev. Dr. Huebsch, of this city, officiated at his funeral on Tuesday last. The deceased leaves a wife and nine children. WE PASS A IV AY. 263 Fro 1/1 " T/ie Hebreui Leader.^'' ORATION DELIVERED AT THE FUNERAL OF REV. DR. GUINZ- BURG, ON JULY 2 2, BY REV. DR. FALK VIDAVER. "The law of truth was in his mouth, and iniquity was not found on his lips ; he walked with me in peace and equity, and did turn away many from iniquity." Malachi ii. 6. These profound words of the Divine prophet describe vividly the character of our highly revered and esteemed rabbi and godly priest, around whose corpse we are now standing. The law of truth was in his mouth. How many are there in the United States, as well as abroad, who longed for his teachings and desired to quench their spiritual thirst for knowledge by the water of his truthful instruc- tions ! How many found a new life in the edifying words of his mouth ! What sad and sorrowful tidings will the departure of this rabbi be unto them ! Still more we, who had for so long a time enjoyed the presence of this honorable teacher and heard the law of truth from his mouth, how must our hearts break and our eyes shed tears at the loss of him ! Indeed, my hearers, the wound which has been produced among the learned men by his demise is incurable, as our sages wisely remark: "These tears shall not be mended whenever a person tears his garment in mourning for his father and mother, for a rabbi and teacher in Israel, and for the holy roll of the five books of Moses which has been consumed by fire." Truly, my hearers, the loss of them is irreparable ; our broken and dejected hearts cannot be healed and re- stored to their former strength, after having lost the foun- tain of their spiritual power, the truthful instructions of our parents and rabbis. 264 WE PASS AWAY. When the invisible hand of cruel death snatches away the crown of a family, the dear father or the loving mother, then the hearts of the survivors are overfilled with grief and sorrow. Yet has the providence of the Almighty created a healing balm for their pain, that is, forgetfulness ; in the course of time their sadness and grief descend into the sea of oblivion and the sun of serenity disperses the dark clouds of their affliction. But if there occurs a calamity like this, if a dear father, lov- ing husband and at the same time a rabbi and teacher in Israel is torn from the bosom of his tender wife and be- loved children and from the midst of his adherents, pupils and friends, then is there a triple loss. Although his faithful wife and children whose hearts break now to see themselves bereft of their most valuable ornament, al- though they may in the course of time be comforted and calmed, yet his children whom he educated spiritually by nourishing them with heavenly food of virtue and knowledge, — as our sages say, " The teacher may be named father, because he brings his pupil into a life of virtue and faith," — those children will never forget him. This rabbi, around whose lifeless body we are standing, was a very spiritual father ; he instilled into the hearts of many true belief in God and virtue ; he reconciled many with our heavenly Father; he preached the words of God in many congregations and proclaimed the truth publicly. Also here in Boston, in our largest congregation, ''Ohabi Shalom," he taught the holy religion and knowledge. Such a dear father cannot be forgotten ; his name is en- graved in indelible characters upon the hearts of his pupils and friends. And iniquity was not found on his lips; that, my hearers, our rabbi proved in the days of his illness. He was not irritated by his great pain and affliction ; in the midst WE PASS AWAY. 265 of his sufferings and chastisements he complained not, but endured it patiently and laid the burden of his woes at the feet of our heavenly Father. He entered into the spirit of the psalmist when he says, "Be merciful unto me, O God, be merciful unto me, for my soul trusteth in thee; and under the shadow of thy wings be my refuge until this calamity is overpast." Now, my hearers, let us honor the deceased rabbi by following his mode of life ; let us, too, have in our mouth only the law of truth, and iniquity shall never be found on our lips ; let us, too, live in peace and equity with each other, and by so doing we shall show respect to our rabbi and teacher. And for the welfare of his soul let us pray. O God most high, spread thy wings of love and care over the soul of our dear rabbi ; lead thou him through the gloomy night into the refulgent glory of salvation ; take him to the bosom of thy fatherly mercy, and be his shield and protection. May he enjoy heavenly delight in thy presence, and may his prayers, which he will ever pour out before thy throne for the happiness of his dear ones whom he left on earth, and to whom he is linked with inseparable chains, be heard. May the words of my mouth be acceptable before thee, O Lord. Amen. Tin-: END, Date Due ' ^^ mm.