Univ.^f 111. Library 51 / ' Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2016 with funding from University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Alternates https://archive.org/details/restorationofpatOOstre THE RESTORATION OF PATHS TO DWELL IN “ And they that shall be of thee shall build the old waste places : thou shalt raise tip the foundations of many generations ; and thou shalt be called, the repairer of the breach, the restorer of paths to dwell in ." — Isaiah Iviii. 12. “ Velleip cum invidia nominis (Origenis) ejus habere etiam scientiam Scrip- turarum, flocci pendens imagines umbrasque larvarum, quarum natura esse dicitur terrere parvulos et in angulis garrire tenebrosis.” — Hieron. in Gen. Procetn. t THE RESTORATION OF PATHS TO DWELL IN ESSAYS ON THE RE-EDITING AND INTERPRETATION OF THE OLD TESTAMENT SCRIPTURES By the Rev. BENJAMIN STREET, b.a. VICAR OF BARNETBY-LE-WOLD STRAHAN & CO. 56 LUDGATE HILL, LONDON 1872 \The Right of Translation is Reserved ] LONDON : PRINTED BY VIRTUE AND CO. CITY ROAD PREFACE. F is becoming daily more evident that tbe conten- tion for the Truth is being transferred from the field of the New Testament to that of the Old. The Church of England, at her reformation, took up new but well-defined positions on the Gospel ground, which have ever since been strengthened and made unassailable. These positions were selected wisely, because a wiser view and better knowledge of the New Testament had been attained. It is high time that the Church should plainly declare what positions she takes up on the ground of % the Old Testament ; for this the Church has never yet done, but has sat still, allowing this individual commentator and that to declare what positions are tenable and necessary to be held; some of which are such that the faith and work committed to the VI PREFACE. Church are neither hindered nor promoted, whether those positions are abandoned or maintained. Other positions of great importance the Church neither abandons nor firmly occupies. Some of these concern the precepts and exemplification of immutable morality ; and the sceptics of the time, finding these carelessly held, select them as points of assault, and make havoc. The Church, indeed, too generally defends such positions on the Old Testament as the Jews selected for defence, and with the same weapons that the Rabbin used. Our Lord and the Apostles did otherwise ; they chose points of strength unsuspected by the Jews, as when our Lord defended the truth of the resurrection from the ground on which Moses stood when the Lord appeared to him at the bush ; and, from that place, scattered the Sadducees, who rested the defence of their opinions on a place in Scripture ignorantly chosen by them. Our Lord purified the Word of God from many false deductions, drawn from it by those of okl time. It is highly probable that many received deductions and conclusions, drawn from the text of the Old Testament by theologians, and handed down from PREFACE. Vll one commentator to another, will appear erroneous if tested by the spirit which is promised to the Church whenever she desires to be guided into the truth. Many things attributed to intentions on the part of the Lord, as the statute of divorce was by the law-men in our Lord’s days, will, if tested by light from Christ, be seen to be attributed to man’s infir- mities. And so the things that belong to man w T ill be rendered to man, and the things of God to God. In this matter the Church has never discrimi- nated for herself, but has listlessly adopted the decision formed by the Jews in assigning to the Lord or to man the responsibility for actions re- corded. It is very possible that a revision of such points in Scripture would reverse the opinion of the men of old time in the Church. ■v It seems also most desirable that the Church would distinctly declare, not only the points which she insists on maintaining (this could be done with- out making them articles of creed), but also what points she has no concern in pronouncing on, as not of the deposit of truth committed to her. If the Church had energy and courage to say, that Tin PREFACE. some questions, such as those concerning the number of hours in the days of creation, do not concern her, she would gain in strength by diminishing the area on which she is (supposed to he) assailable. And so with several other points. Many of the difficulties which the Church finds in defending the Old Testament are attributable to the fact that hitherto she has been defending, not the original, but a Jewish translation of it, made in a very debased age of Jewish theology. For the English Old Testament is substantially and mentally the Septuagint ; and the spirit of the original, clad in that version, is as the free woman Sarah disguised in the garments of the bond woman Ha gar. The Word of God is as shackled and ham- pered by its diction and temper as David was in Saul’s armour ; and whilst so apparelled, the Old Testament will not triumph over the Philistine. The writer of these essays has ventured to ques- tion the claims of the Septuagint, in many places, to he considered a true reflection of the original ; and he has also suggested an inquiry as to whether the Hebrew text, as we have it, has preserved the true order of arrangement which it must have once ex- PREFACE. IX hibited. He has considered that on such points the Church has never cared to pronounce, and that conse- quently they may he discussed without any breach of that loyalty which he owes to the Church. As regards a remarshalling of the contents of some books of the Old Testament, advocated in the following essays. He has considered the Old Testa- ment Scriptures as being the heirloom jewels of the Church, and that wisdom and propriety require her to dispose them so as best to adorn the Bride of Christ ; and that it cannot be asserted, on any good grounds, that the arrangement of them which the Jewish Church made and used is most edifying for the use of the Church of Christ, or fittest for setting forth the doctrine of God her Saviour. But though the author considers the contents of some books to be in a dislocated condition, he does not view them as compacted of fragments by different authors, and written at different times. And although he advocates the transposition of many passages, it is not his notions, but the require- ments of consistency in fact and doctrine, which suggest its being done, so as to reproduce the original structure of the book. X PREFACE. lie also protests against any comparison being drawn, by superficial readers, between tbe process of re-ordering tbe contents of a book of Scripture, wbicb he advocates, and that legerdemain which Tertullian charges on Marcion and others, who constructed out of Scripture a patchwork text, utterly at variance with the original mind of the Scriptures, but compacted by them to support their own theories. A method of treating Scripture which he compares to a method applied by some unhappy writers to the writings of Virgil, such as Hosidius Geta, who concocted a tragedy, “ Medea,” with verses picked out here and there from the AEneid. “ Tides hodie ex Yirgilio fabulam in totum aliam componi, materia secundum versus, versibus secundum ma- teriam concinnatis.” We have seen a story , totally different from that in Virgil , composed by picking out Virgil's lines where they suited the subject in hand, and dovetailing passages so composed to construct the story required. — (He Praes. Her., xxxix.) Tertullian, indeed, with characteristic rashness, adds that a perplexing order in Scripture must have been providentially allowed so as to supply materials PREFACE . xi to heretics, since we read, there must needs also be heresies. Elsewhere, in a better mind, he accounts for the confused disposition and ambiguities in Scripture by concluding that they have been permitted to be as a test of tenacity in faith : “lit fides, non mediocri praemio destinata, difficultate constaret.” — Apol, xxi. Perhaps the ancient Scriptures have been suffered to come into the hands of the Church obscure in expression and confused in arrangement, in many places, because the Church has the spirit that can guide her into the truth, if she will but stir it up and profit by it ; and the first requisite for profiting by the help of the spirit is a conviction that things, when shown by the spirit, will be shown by a light which never shone on them before Christ came, and will probably fall into an order, never before then discernible in them. Hitherto the Church has been satisfied to read the Old Testament by the taper of the Alexandrian translator. INDEX OF CONTENTS. i. PAGE 1. Hebrew written characters. — 2. Collection and custody of sacred rolls. — 3. Copyists 1 II. 1. Rehabilitation of the Hebrew Scriptures by Ezra. — 2. Un- concern of the early Church for the Hebrew text when taking over the Old Testament. — 3. The Old Testament came into the Church in the form of a Jewish Greek translation. — 4. The order of the matter in some books dislocated.- — 5, Its reordering desirable . . . .22 III. 1. Argument in favour of rearranging the book Exodus. — 2. Evidence of disarrangement in it.— 3. Its present order injurious to the right understanding of it. — 4. NoLevitical ordinances till Moses had made a second abode on Mount Sinai. — 5. Plea for a better ordering of the book . . 57 IV. 1. The book Exodus probably transposed by the ancient Jews. — 2. Their reasons for transposing its contents : Original order recoverable. — 3. Its desirableness. — 4. Confusing effect of its present arrangement 84 XIV CONTENTS. PAGE Y. 1. Proposed revision of the authorised version. — 2. Jewish interpretations not to he implicitly trusted. — 3. Jewish misconceptions as to the visitation of a father’s iniquity on his children. — 4. Decadence and revival of the know- ledge of Hebrew . . . . . . . .102 VI. TRANSLATION AND INTERPRETATION. 1. Some causes of imperfections in the English authorised ver- sion. — 2. When interpretation struggles with translation the context is the umpire. — 3. National prejudices have swayed interpretation. — 4. Corrupt theology has darkened it. — 5. The two streams of prophecy in Isaiah . . .126 VII. 1. Reason, Tradition, and the Spirit, as interpreters of Scrip- ture. — 2. Revealed and natural religion considered as judges of the truth. — 3. Scripture appealing to the animal creation. — 4. Behemoth and the beasts of the field 151 VIII. 1. The Lord names Himself. — 2. The words Elohim and Jehovah. — 3. Scope of Scripture. — 4. Creating, forming, making. — 5. Other races besides the race from Paradise. — 6. The Lord walking in the garden. — 7. The Cherubim 174 IX. THE INVASION OF CANAAN. 1. In what works the Lord employs the agency of man. — 2. What works He reserves to Himself. — 3. The agents which He appointed for the dispossession of the Canaanites. — 4. How they were superseded. — 5 . Man in power goes beyond his commission. — 6. Man interpreting adds bitter- ness to the record 207 CONTENTS . xv PAGE 1. Specialities of the Hebrew moral temperament.— 2. The peculiar position and condition of the people in the wilder- ness. — 3. Futility of the claim of the nation to military successes. — 4. Commentators 229 XI. 1 . Hebrew texts examined. — 2. I will destroy all the people. — 3. Thou shall smite them and utterly destroy them . — 4. Ana- thema. — 5. Nor show mercy unto them. — 6. 1 will cut them off 246 XII. 1 . No direct instructions to use violence given by the Lord to Joshua. — 2. Formula peculiar to a direct divine com- munication. — 3. Formula when the communication pro- ceeded from a priest. — 4. Means supplied to the priest for obtaining direction. — 5. Urim and Thummim . . .267 XIII. 1 . The morality of the invasion of Canaan judged by its con- sequences. — 2. Eclipse of the priest’s office as the medium of divine direction. — 3. The subsequent fortunes of the dispossessed nations 287 XIY. 1. The Gentile Church. — 2. A falling away in it analogous to that of the Israelites. — 3. Influence of the delusions of the world on the Church. — 4. Influence of the temper of the age on translators .303 XY. 1 . Relative places occupied by the ceremonial law, and by the Temple services in the Jewish life. — 2. The usual concep- tion of the Temple sacrifices is confused and exaggerated. — 3. Elementary principles of worship by sacrifice. — 4. Holocaust 324 XVI CONTENTS. PAGE XVI. 1. The Temple and the Church. — 2. The sacrifice which Christ made. — 3. His offering; of it . . . . . 340 XVII. 1. Sacrifice appealing to the Lord. — 2. The memorial in the sacrifice. — 3. The remembrance at the Eucharist. — 4. The Passover household feast. — 5. The Passover in the Temple. 6. The preparation 351 XVIII. 1. Conventional and popular notions of the status of the Israelites. — 2. Of the means of access of the Jew to the mind of the Lord. — 3. The more sure access of the Christian 372 XIX. 1. Christ’s promise of reply to prayer. — 2. The name of the Lord. — 3. His name proclaimed before the Commandments were published 388 XX. The understanding mind and the believing spirit . . . 406 I. 1. Hebrew written characters. — 2. Collection and custody of sacred rolls. — 3. Copyists. 1. The form of tlie earliest written letters which we can ascertain to liave been used by the people of whom were tbe writers of the Hebrew Scriptures indicates tbe valley of tbe Euphrates as tbe most probable locality from wbicb tbe ancestor of that people came ; tbe character of writing now called Samaritan being taken as tbe nearest known ap- proach to tbe ancient writing of tbe Israelites, and as having features indicating tbe first use of marks by wbicb a fact was conveyed by a type to tbe eye. It is not improbable that the first marks impressed on objects would be made by the weapon of the man who, having won them with it, desired to stamp them as bis property ; and that the marks would be made with no more idea of expressing speech by B 2 THE RESTORATION OF symbols than the early creature bad wbicb im- pressed, and left impressed, on tbe then soft surface on which it trod, the imprints of its feet, which, on the now hardened surface, record sufficient to inform the naturalist of the habits and form of the creature which left those traces of its path. The man who impressed the head of the arrow of his bow — and he may have been Nimrod the mighty hunter — no more thought of originating written speech than the man who first sent the electric spark through a wire conceived of originat- ing the electric telegraph. We are not at present concerned with the centres and origin of written language in all parts of the world — there may have been several and separate germs in various places — but with the origin of the writing used among a people who won possessions by the sword and the bow (Gen. xlviii. 22), and whose ancestor is traceable to the plains near the Euphrates. The plastic clays of the Euphratean valley still show how they received and have retained impres- sions that are records, and still speak. The warrior, when war became a pursuit, might PATHS TO DWELL IN. 3 choose his sword out of which to fashion a tool with which to inscribe his right to conquered land upon the face of their rocks. The shepherd class, to which Abraham belonged, would retain the bow for use ; the flint head of whose arrow would require softer substances on which to leave its impress. The arrow-headed character would abide, and acquire gradual modifications among such people. Inter- course with Egypt would introduce them to the papyrus as a material, and to the reed as an instru- ment ; writing would then be either by characters pierced through the leaf, or made to appear on its surface by means of ink. The character would thus gradually become invested with the features due to delineation, not impression, and to the pliable powers of the penman’s hand; and the original separate arrow-head marks would coalesce into forms closely resembling those of the Samaritan alphabet, the earliest type of Hebrew writing that survives. When the Jews, long after, were carried away captive to the Euphrates, they found at Babylon the character called the nail-headed character, a bastard arrow-headed letter, in use ; and the Jews born during the captivity, and educated in Babylonia, 4 THE RESTORATION OF learned the square-faced character of writing, popu- larly called the Hebrew, itself formed by the adhe- sion of several separate marks into one formal cha- racter ; and on their return brought it hack with them, and it was used in copying the Scriptures as being the only mode of writing known to the people. But the Jews who had not been involved in the abduction of their countrymen do Babylon, and had been left for vine-dressers and for husbandmen (Jer. lii. 16 ) in Judaea, retained consequently their fathers’ type of writing ; nor would they admit that they who came from Babylon should abolish that type, and instal the character of writing which they had learnt in captivity as the sacred character in the copies of the law. Hence some of the people pertinaciously retained the Pentateuch in the old character, and to this fact we owe the precious ad- vantage of having two distinct copies of the Pen- tateuch, one called the Hebrew, the other the Samaritan. St. Jerome observes that the Hebrew and Sama- ritan letters differed in their apices, fcepaicu, or projecting knobs. He perceived that the skeletons PATHS TO DWELL IN 5 of the letters were of the same genus in both writings, and that the feature distinctions were due to variation of species. When a language ceases to be spoken its written words become dumb, and like the portraits of men who were not known as living men to those who look on them, require to be named to the spectator, or to be inscribed with their names, in order to their being recognised and known. So when the Hebrew language had become obsolete, it required a nomenclator to read it ; and when such men, who inherited a traditionary skill in reading it, were scat- tered, and on the verge of disappearing altogether, learners who sought to acquire from them the art of rightly reading the Hebrew Scriptures used helps to record and preserve the right pronunciation given by the master, jotting down on the unvowelled text before them arbitrary marks indicating, singly or when combined, the modulation of the teacher, as, in reading to them, he vowelled this or that syllable. This method, a mere scholar’s expedient at first, was afterwards elaborated into the system of Hebrew vowel points, by the help of which the Hebrew text is readable by us. 6 THE RESTORATION OE These auxiliaries to reading seem to have come into use at about the same time as did the Greek accents ; but neither the inventor of Hebrew vowel points nor of Greek accents is known.* In affixing these vowel sounds to the Hebrew original text, the Habbin asserted and exercised an authority over the text, and the correctness of their 0 judgment is fairly open to criticism: the meaning of a word is often altogether at the mercy of the vowel points. Between the second and third verses of the 91st Psalm is a little word which the Greek translators seem to have mistaken to mean not, but the Habbin have rightly vowel-pointed it so as to make it mean God ; and so the Syrian version, made before the vowel points were used, has translated it. In all ambiguous cases they may not have been so happy. In some cases the Habbin differ among themselves as to the proper vowel points to be assigned. The correct Hebrew text itself is singularly well * The usefulness of the method was perceived by the Arabs, who add vowel points to the text of the Qoran (but not to other writings), to stereotype the pronunciation and, in some degree, the meaning of its text. PATHS TO DWELL LN. 7 ascertained. In very few instances, in proportion to its bulk, are readings suspected to be questionable. A multitude of various readings detected by Kenni- cott, De Rossi, and others, are variations merely in vowel-pointing by the Rabbin. 2. The Old Testament has been too vaguely looked on as a book, whereas it is the Ecclesiastic Library of the Jews, the accumulated literature of a thousand years, not the popular but the eccle- siastical and national literature. The mouth of Balaam foretold that the people of Israel should not be reckoned among the nations, and they are in no respects more distinct in habits from other nations than in the peculiar provision for the pre- servation of one portion of their literature, that which was not the fruit of genius, but the result of inspiration. No other nation being favoured with oracles from God, no other nation required such provision for the perpetual preservation of writings. The Ten Commandments, the basis of their reli- gion, were inscribed on slabs of stone, and laid up in a wooden ark, which it was not lawful to touch. The written law was laid up by the side of this 8 THE RESTORATION OF ark. Put this book , said Moses of the Law, by the side of the Ark (I)eut. xxxi. 26), not inside the Ark, as versions have it. And when Samuel had written the manner of the kingdom in a book, he laid it up before the Lord (1 Sam. x. 25), that is to say, at the place where men worshipped by prostration, which place was called Before the Lord. Which words show that canonical writings were deposited outside the veil of the Temple. Hence we may perhaps obtain some notion of the manner in which genuine inspired writings and prophecies were added to the canon of Scripture, whilst uncanonical and false prophecies could never obtain admission and canonicity. The first mention of a prophetic admonition committed to writing, addressed, not to the nation but to an individual, is where we read, there came to Jehoram a ivriting from Elijah the prophet (2 Chron. xxi. 12). The writer is called Elijah the prophet to distinguish him from Elijah the Tishbite. The earliest instance of the divine command to write what a prophet had been inspired to utter, is where Isaiah is commanded by the Lord to write what he had foretold to Ahaz (Is. viii.). PATHS TO DWELL IN. 9 Isaiah proceeded to select two faithful witnesses, the number required by the law, witnesses, that is to say, to the authenticity of the document, one of which was Uriah, who, it would appear, was the high priest (see 2 Kings xvi. 10). The words Bind up the testimony (or rather, the things witnessed to), seal the law (ver. 16), probably have reference to the securing and verifying the prophecy written in the great roll with a man’s pen, and witnessed by the two priests (ver. 2). These details connected with the first great prophecies of the prophets, thus circumstantially given, show us how writings were certified as inspired ; the document would be exhibited to the priests, who, ascertaining its authenticity, would lay it up in the Temple. It is most probable that the scribes of the Temple would copy, it; and, in doing so, would affix a title to it, such as those continually met with, e.g., The vision of Isaiah, the son of Amoz. The burden of Damascus. The ‘writing of Hezekiah when he teas sick. Such headings are not neces- sarily parts of Scripture. The title to the roll which began with the twenty-fifth chapter of Proverbs, is instructive on 10 THE RESTORATION OF the matter, These are also proverbs of Solomon, which the men of Hezekiah , King of Judah, copied out. The Syriac says brother-in-law (relatives), the Septuagint the friends of Hezekiah. The time referred to was the time of the reformation of religion under that king. The form of the title is an evidence of the care and precaution observed with respect to the certificate of authen- ticity required to be found on every canonical roll. It is almost certain that the 7nen of King Hezekiah were commissioners appointed by him to renew the rolls of Scripture, when other things in it were renewed (2 Chron. xxix. 19). The Hebrew text says, which the men of Hezekiah extracted. We find that St. Paid took the precaution of ensuring the authenticity of his Epistles by his own sign manual : to one of the earliest (2 Thess. penult, verse) adding, in all my Epistles so I write. This is inserted but once, and apparently then because he suspected that the Thessalonians had been imposed on by a spurious epistle (ii. 3). We have thus information given us how the authenticity of the Hew Testament Scriptures was PATHS TO DWELL IN. 1 1 certified. Isaiah shows us how it was done in the days of the ancient prophets. This also shows us why the Book of Jasher, the works of Solomon on natural history, and the great mass of Solomon’s songs, have not been pre- served to us ; they were not inspired, and therefore not enrolled nor laid up in the Temple. The Books of Chronicles, being the work of the king’s recorder, not of the Temple scribes, were not, and are not, reckoned canonical by the Jews. Histories may be true and authentic, though not canonical. If an opinion may be offered as to how the sacred rolls were preserved, the most probable seems to be that they were enclosed in earthen cylinders. Take these evidences, said. Jeremiah to Baruch, alluding to documents certified by witnesses and sealed, and put them in an earthen vessel, that they may continue many days (Jer. xxxii. 14). These words show us the usual method of securing written rolls. When St. Paul said, this treasure ice have in earthen vessels, he may have been mentally likening the light in his heart, the inspired knowledge in it, in the earthly vessel of the body, to the treasures of inspiration contained in earthen THE RESTORATION OF I 2 vessels in the Temple of old. And possibly he has some allusion to these earthen vessels when he says, of the spiritual house of God, comparing it with the material Temple, In a great house are not only vessels of gold and silver , but also of wood and of earth (2 Tim. ii. 20). The whole East testifies to the explorer that the works proceeding from the potter’s wheel were used for all purposes, and were in many instances of such beauty and grace of form as to be fit for A r essels of honour even in the Temple ; the eastern potter surpassed his fellows, the sculptor and caster of metal work, in the variety and elegance of his works. Fictile vessels also were most likely to escape the hand of the spoiler, and the rust and the moth did not affect them. Jeremiah, to secure his title- deeds from the approaching spoiler, as we have seen, enclosed them in an earthen vessel. The gold and the silver articles in the Temple were the first seized. The more precious rolls in their earthen cylinders would escape the plunderer’s hand. It may seem strange that we have no mention PATHS TO DWELL IN. 13 of the fate of the precious rolls on those occasions when regret for the gold and silver carried away by the spoiler is expressed ; none are mentioned as brought back from Babylon, though even knives are recorded. The conclusion is that the plunderers overlooked them. Their preservation is the more miraculous ; the Lord hid them in the hollow of his hand. It is, perhaps, not to be hoped for, that if ever the vaults with which the Temple area is honeycombed are opened to the explorer, any Temple rolls will be recovered ; but yet, out of the eater came forth meat , when records confirming the Scriptures were found in the carcase of Mnevch, the city of the king who destroyed Israel. There was therefore formed in the Temple the Great Jewish Librarv, which we call the Old Testament Scriptures. The law, as the Books of Moses were called, at least the autograph law, would appear to have been beside the ark, not in it, within the veil. A book of the law was carried by the judge who went his circuit, that he might decide cases out of it ; for in the East, to open the hook means to give a decision al pi hattorah, by the mouth of the H THE RESTORATION OF law. The books icere opened , and the dead were judged out of those things written in the books (Rev. xx. 12). The ceremonial law was well known to the people ; it was kept in remembrance by the daily habits of their lives. Thus the ceremonial law was widely known among the people ; and the moral law to some ; hut it cannot he supposed that the writings of the prophets were ever known to them, from writings ; though many of their prophecies must have become current, bio doubt a vast mass of the Scripture, known to many now, was as little known to the people of Judah and Israel as Hooker’s works or Bishop Butler’s writings to the generality of Englishmen. The Jews did not call Scripture the Word of God , as we do ; but any information given to them by the priest’s lips they spoke of as a word from the Lord. Is there any word from the Lord, asked Zedekiah of Jeremiah.* * So completely had this notion of the meaning of the Word of the Lord obtained in the latest times, that the Rabbin illustrate the spiritual destitution foretold in the words a famine of hearing the Word , by a supposed state of things when, for want of priests to PATHS TO DWELL IN. 15 Yet were there among all classes of the people three great and invaluable truths, firmly held even by the most ignorant : first, that they had a law given them directly from God ; secondly, that misery was the consequence of sin, not of blind chance ; and thirdly that a Deliverer was coming. Even the depraved Samaritan woman, whom our Lord met at Jacob’s well, knew the creed, I know that Messias cometh. And this belief was naturally expressed thus plainly by a woman’s lips, for the minds of Jewish women were moulded by the hope of finding the Messiah born of one of themselves, or of their daughters ; for this was the grace , \cipw, promised to the Jewish woman, as to be the flesh of the Messiah was the grace promised to the Jewish man. The angel who announced to the Virgin Mary that she was the chosen mother of the promised Redeemer, expressed consult, a woman could not get information as to whether an insect in the oven had rendered the batch of bread unclean. It would appear that gradually the office of the teaching priest was almost confined to solving nice questions as to ceremonial clean- ness or uncleanness. The instance adduced above, from Maimo- nides, makes us feel very strongly our Lord’s observations about the Word of God and the traditions of the Elders. THE RESTORA TION OF 1 6 the fact to her by declaring that she was the KeyapLTMjievT], the one who had at last received the gift of the y^apis. 3. But though the circulation of the Scriptures was unknown among the ancient Jews, we have such evidence as we should expect to find, that the preservation of them, and the providing of such copies as were required were well cared for. The scribe always was in honour ; in our Lord’s days, indeed, the title ranked among the highest ; and the Oriental penman was beneath no artificer in the beauty of his work, and in skill and devotion to it ; he was the slave of unreasoning instinctive accuracy of reproduction ; and from his social and ecclesiastical position, this peculiar mould of his mind greatly tended to make the literal and formal condition of the text to be more considered and more Valued by him than the spirit and meaning of it. But this evil was made by Providence an in- strument towards the preservation of the text for the use of the people to come, who should delight in searching out its spirit; for, owing to this in- stinct in the Jewish scribe, the copy of a roll PATHS TO DWELL LN. n resembled the original as exactly as the bird’s nest of the year resembles the first nest constructed by the first bird of the species. The scribe appears in the Temple, and offices for his use are mentioned. When Baruch had read Jeremiah’s prophecy to the great men, they made inquiries as to its origin and genuineness, and Baruch answered, He pronounced all these words ivith his mouth , and I icrote them with ink in the book (Jer. xxxvi. 18). He read the roll to them in the chamber of Gemariah, the son of Shaphan, the scribe , and it was laid up in the chamber of Elishamah, the scribe , in the Temple ; from whence the king had to send for it. They sent it from the chamber in which it was read to the chamber of the scribe, which sug- gests that it was for the purpose offits being copied. Huldah the prophetess dwelt in Jerusalem, in a place which is called the Mishna, a word meaning a copy, but translated college in our version. Her father-in-law was keeper of the wardrobe or gar- ments, most probably the Temple vestry ; and she being a relative of an officer of the Temple, and a prophetess, would naturally be found lodged in one c 1 8 THE RESTORATION OF of the multitude of apartments that so clustered the Temple walls and courts that it was a town in itself. It is not impossible that the name of her apart- ment, the Mishna * indicates the offices of the copyists attached to the Temple ; which, in those evil days, were unoccupied and unused by the scribes, and, like all other parts of the Temple, had been diverted to baser uses. For since the finding of the Temple copy of the law in the Temple was, in that age, as the discovery of some ancient inscription in these days, the care and copying of the Scriptures must have ceased for some time ; and the various apartments of the Temple must have been turned * The word mishna in biblical Hebrew means a copy , or dupli- cate ; Deuteronomy is called a mishna of the law : and the king was commanded to make for himself a mishna, or copy of the manner of the kingdom , the statute respecting the regal duties -written by Samuel and incorporated now into Deuteronomy, which contains duplicates of many statutes made in Israel and codified in that book. The Aramaics dialectically pronounced the Hebrew sh as th , and also wrote the one letter for the other : with them mishna is mithna. But until instances are adduced of the dia- lectic conversion of th into sh, it cannot be admitted that mishna comes from the root thanah , to teach. Talmud , not mishna , means theological doctrine. PATHS TO DWELL IN. 19 to common uses ; so that Huldah’s living in one of them need excite no surprise. It has beeen suggested that Huldah dwelt in the second part of Jerusalem, for mishna is a second production of an original, a copy, Hut cpwais, secunda editio , as the word is translated in Justinian’s decree. But there is no trace of such a term as the second part of J erusalem, or of any town ; though the word J erusalem has, in some places, been vowelled by the Itabbin so as to appear in the dual number ; and, indeed, was a town with a double acropolis, a sacred and a regal one. But the term mishna, applied to a town, would have the sense of amhiguus in Horace’s expression ambiguam Salamina, a duplicate of the old town. We are therefore driven to look elsewhere for a meaning for the mishna as a residence, and the most probable seems the copyist’s house, or duplicate office. Whilst on the subject of the transcription of records, especially sacred ones, it is not im- pertinent to notice the fact that no Eastern scribe began his work without heading it by some solemn formula, such as the heading to the book Deu- 20 THE RESTORATION 01 teronomy, affixed by the Arab scribe, In the name of God, the merciful and gracious, we begin the fifth book, and it is the book of Repetition. The scribe who copied the Samaritan Targum closes with the words, The law is finished, blessed be tlie Giver of it. The scribe’s name was also almost invariably appended by himself; we have a trace of this custom in the words, I, Tertius, who wrote this epistle, salute you in the Lord (Rom. xvi. 22). The solemnity connected with the act of tran- scribing in the East, and the instinctive oropyt] of the Jews for the Scripture rolls, and the Eastern scribe’s scrupulousness in reproducing the original before him, when appreciated, greatly justify the other reasons which we have for believing in the perfect authenticity of the Scriptures. And though it cannot be affirmed that all that the Lord has spoken to man, or all that He commanded to be written, has been preserved ; as, similarly, it cannot be affirmed that every tree good for food that was planted in Eden has been pre- served ; yet, even as fruits of the earth in abundance for the wants of man, both for food and heal- ing, remain constant in their nutritive and sanative PATHS TO DWELL IN. 2 I virtues ; so, not bread alone, but the words that have proceeded from tbe moutb of the Lord have also been preserved in abundance with their un- alterable property for strengthening faith and heal- ing the soul. THE RESTORATION OF 2 2 II. 1. Rehabilitation of the Hebrew Scriptures by Ezra. — 2. Uncon- cern of the Early Church for the Hebrew text when taking over the Old Testament. — 3. The Old Testament came into the Church in the form of a Jewish Greek translation. — 4. The order of the matter in some books dislocated. — 5. Its re-ordering desirable. 1. On the restoration of a Jewish commonwealth at Jerusalem by the chiefs of that portion of the captive people which returned to their native land, Ezra, priest and scribe, probably the representative of the hereditary Temple scribe, was inspired to renew the rolls of the Temple. He and his coadjutors brought the several books and writings for the first time into one collection ; giving them very nearly the arrangement which they occupy now in the volume long known in Christianity as the Bible, or Bibliotheca. It is reasonable to suppose that the Books of Moses and the Psalms would come to Ezra’s hands PATHS TO DWELL IN. 23 in a very perfect state ; at least in such condition as they had been in long before the captivity — the Books of Moses, from having been known and used as the Jaw ; the Psalms, from the familiarity of all Levites with their contents. But hooks such as Joshua, and the 'writings of the Prophets, would come into Ezra’s hands in a less settled form ; Joshua, and some other books, from their antiquity, and from the little need there was of renewed copies in times when they were not read for any practical purposes ; the writings of the Pro- phets, because the Prophets could not have issued connected copies of their writings. The several prophetic writings, such as those of Isaiah and Jeremiah, must first have been on loose and de- tached parchments, and if these had ever been classified and digested into order, that order was liable to be disarranged by various accidents. Pro- bably every heading and title in the Book of Isaiah marks the beginning of a separate parchment roll, its date being rarelv indicated. Though we have an allusion to the harps of the Temple choristers as taken with them to Babylon, and though even such things as the knives for 2 4 THE RESTORATION OF sacrifices are mentioned in the catalogue of things brought back from Babylon, there is no allusion whatever in the Jewish records to any preservation of the rolls of the Temple at the taking of Jeru- salem, nor to any bringing back of rolls of Scripture from Babylon. Jerusalem) however, had not been so destroyed, nor the land so depopulated as to render it doubtful whether rolls of the Scriptures would be forthcoming. The Samaritan Pentateuch may possibly be the representative in type of letter, and in matter, of a copy of the law preserved in the land during the captivity. The Samaritan notion, that the Penta- teuch alone is Scripture, is itself probably the notion on the subject which was universal among the people before Ezra’s compilation. It was after Ezra’s days that synagogues ap- peared, and that the public reading of the Prophets as well as the law was introduced ; Providence ordering it so that the words of prophecy might be sown broadcast over the land, because the ages of expectation were fast running out, and Christ, of whom the Prophets spoke, was drawing near. Ezra’s work on the sacred rolls was therefore that PATHS TO DWELL IN. 25 of an editor. He had to exercise that judgment which is required in every one who has to pro- duce a genuine text from various manuscripts before him, and to digest various and detached writings into one consistent whole. It is not doubted that he had the assistance of the Spirit in the work, but this does not exclude the use of judgment. His work had not for its object a critical, literary, editing of the Scriptures, in which judgment only would be required, but the restora- tion of a shattered text under the guidance of the Spirit. We need not, therefore, be surprised at finding chronological inconsistencies exhibited in the se- quence of paragraphs, and repetitions of matters appearing elsewhere. The work was not done in the interests of chronology, and Ezra would rather repeat than omit anything genuine. Of the same event he may have found two distinct records, each as authentic as a Gospel, yet each having its peculiar points, as we see is the case in the Gospels. In some cases, also, as Habbi David Kimchi reasonably suggests, Ezra may have been obliged, from several manuscripts, none perfect, to compile a 26 THE RESTORATION OF complete text of a book, suck as the Book of J oshua, supplying himself with matter out of another manuscript where the manuscript before him was decayed or wanting. He could hardly avoid displacing paragraphs in such a process of compilation. The Scriptures have never been re-edited since Ezra’s work. Hillel’s recension may vary from Ezra’s text in a slight degree, but it was not a new edition of the Scriptures ; and when the re-editing of a book — Exodus for instance — is suggested, no alteration of the original text by the adoption of proposed various readings is suggested. For all useful purposes there is no other Hebrew text than the one in use. Justifiable emendations of it would have but an insignificant effect on it ; but there are good reasons for suspecting that the order of the matter, though left by Ezra as it had long been, is not the original order in many books. The Septuagint Greek version was by no means a re-edition of the Hebrew Scriptures ; in all the specialities that constitute an edition it falls very far short of Ezra’s work. St. Jerome doubtlessly did produce, in one sense, a new edition of the Old PATHS TO DWELL LN. Testament ; but the framers of tlie English author- ised version simply concocted a translation ; they did not edit the Bible in any sense. The work still remains to be done by the Church. 2. The unconcern of the early Church for the Hebrew text appears marvellous, when we consider the power which the acquisition of the Hebrew language and the knowledge of the original text would have given to the Church in the first cen- turies of her existence, especially in dealing with, and controverting, the Jews. But the Hebrew text of the Scriptures passes out of sight for all practical purposes. In the ancient records of the Church the Fathers cannot be said to have made any use of it ; yet the study which they gave to profane Greek literature, if bestowed on the Hebrew, would have made them masters of it. But the Septuagint was the Hebrew Scripture to them. The utter ignorance of the Hebrew text among the Fathers is nowhere more evident than in Tertullian’s argument against some who asserted that the Hebrew Genesis began with the words, Ln the beginning God created for Himself a Son (In 28 THE RESTORATION OF Praxeam V.) ; instead of appealing to tlie Hebrew, he says, hoc ut firmum non sit alia me deducunt arg amenta, refuting the mistranslation by subtleties concerning the manner of God’s existence. If the Church had possessed any authorised version he might have appealed to it. But it would seem that, in the early centuries of the Church, the interpreta- tion of the Old Testament was left to private judgment. The Greek Septuagint, we know, widely pre- vailed among the Jews, but they always had a strong preference for the original, and would have used it exclusively had they not lost the language. The mob at Jerusalem listened in silence when they heard St. Paul addressing them in a Hebrew dialect ; and many Jewish converts may have been of those who eschewed the Greek Septuagint, and heard the Scriptures read from the Hebrew, and translated to them into their current Aramaic dialect by the in- terpreter in the Synagogue. Such converts, it has been supposed, were those Hebrews who murmured against the Hellenists (Acts vi.), and for the use of such St. Matthew wrote his Gospel in the Aramaic dialect ; but this PATHS TO DWELL LN. 2 () text of his Gospel was so soon supplanted and obli- terated by its Greek counterpart, as to make it evi- dent that the great body of the Church westward from Judaea adopted the Greek Scriptures exclu- sively ; whilst the other great body eastward used exclusively the Syriac Peshito. It is with the great Western communities only that we have to do. Origen alone did anything to preserve the Hebrew text in the Church. He inserted the Hebrew text with the equivalent Greek letters in the two first columns of his “ Hexapla,’ in which he also inserted a revised text of the Septuagint ; but his invaluable w'ork found no copyists nor readers. St. Jerome went to the Jews to seek the Hebrew text, and, having found it among them, left it with them, as a thing of no use to the Church, and not needful to be added to her muniments. The powerful influence of the Greek version in confirming the Gospel among Jewish converts, and the use made of it by the Apostles, had made the Septuagint utterly hateful to the unconverted Jews, who consequently betook themselves with a revived zeal to the study of the language of Moses, and painfully reacquired that amount of acquaintance 3o THE RESTORATION OF with that ancient language of their ancestors which enabled one of their learned men to give such assist- ance as he did to St. Jerome. So generally did the knowledge of Hebrew dry up, that even Philo Judaeus could not distinguish between Hebrew and Chaldee, and, writing in Greek, betrays his ignorance of the Hebrew. The letter and language of the ancient oracles of God, the title-deeds of the Church, were as un- known to the ancient Church as the letter and language of an Anglo-Saxon charter to the gene- rality of Englishmen in the present day. When the Fathers speak of the Jewish Scriptures they mean the Septuagint ; and when St. Augustine says, “The Jews are our librarians ; they bring the books to us when we study,” the Greek version is alluded to. It is to the unconverted fragments of the Jewish people that the Christian Church owes the preserva- tion of the Old Testament in the original language of its authors. They also edited the first printed editions of it at Venice, about the time when the ecclesiastical power of the day was exercising itself in judging and burning John IIuss, at Constance, for attempting to expound the Scriptures. PATHS TO DWELL IN. 3 1 8. The early ancient Church utterly ignored the Hebrew text of the Old Testament ; and it is not plain whether the collective Church, by any act, ever took over the Old Testament, or sanctioned and recognised any special preferable text of its Scrip- tures, even in the Greek language. We find the ancient Church using, besides the New Testament, a Bibliotheca, whence our word Bible. Tertullian says that there might be seen in his days, in the Serapeion at Alexandria, Bibliothecce cum ipsis Hebraicis Uteris, volumes containing the Greek Septuagint version together with the Hebrew text. These ancient Bibliothecae seem to have been col- lections of sacred and devotional works, the produc- tion, by compilation, of individual zealous men. The nucleus of the Bibliotheca was the Greek version of the Old Testament. But the germ of the collection was the Pentateuch, and with it probably the Psalter. The Greek version of the Pentateuch is so superior to the versions of all other books, that the historical translators, sent to King Ptolemy with the rolls from Jerusalem, probably translated only it. It shows evidence of being* the work of men conversant with 3 2 THE RESTORATION OF Jewish rites and customs. The versions of the other books are very inferior in accuracy. In the Penta- teuch there is not a Hebrew term that is not trans- lated ; even names, such as La chai roi and Jehovah Jireh , are translated. In the other books many Hebrew words are transferred untranslated ; and the version of some books, such as Hosea, is very wide of the original ; and in some places the Greek ver- sion gives no perceptible sense. The other sacred books of the Jews thus seem to have been translated as they best could, and added to the Pentateuch ; to them, books such as Enoch and the Maccabees and others were added, the Maccabees having lived after the days of Ptolemy’s interpreters. Thus additions were made gradually to the Biblio- theca, and to such additions we may suppose St. Jerome alludes when he speaks of successive coj3yists adding what they thought good, quisque pro arbitrio suo. He may refer to such additions as that of the history of Susannah to the beginning, and the history of Bel and the Dragon to the end, of the Book of Daniel ; or to the substitution of Theodo- tion’s version of Daniel, containing these, for the PATHS TO DWELL IN. 33 original version of the Seventy in the Church Bibliotheca ; of which substitution St. Jerome says “ id cur accident plane nescio words which at once justify us in concluding that the Church never troubled herself about the condition of the Old Testament. A similar Bibliotheca was formed, by aggregation, on the nucleus of the Gospels, hut the Church from the first eliminated apocryphal Gospels, Acts, and Epistles from her New Testament. What St. Paul had left with Carpus, and what he desired Timothy to bring with him when he came, which our version calls a cloak, appears from the Syriac version to have been a Bibliotheca, Beth Kitah , a collection of sacred and religious books. From such a Bibliotheca St. Paul quotes the op- position of Jannes and Jambres to Moses ; and from such a collection St. Jude quotes dhe prophecy of Enoch and the contention between Michael and Satan for the body of Moses. Their readers knew well whence they quoted such things ; and the in- spired writers, in making references to the uninspired volumes of the Bibliotheca,* naturally do so without * Hence we may know that the citation, Eye hath not seen , &c. (1 Cor. ii. 9), being introduced by the formula wg yeypa7rrai, must D 34 THE RESTORATION OF the formula, as it is written , which they employ to designate quotations from inspired books. The scribe of the Old Dispensation seems to have been represented in the Christian Church by the Bibliothecarius, often a Coenobite, who would insert important works in suitable places between the books of the volumes he copied. Thus we find the treatise of Athanasius on the Psalms preceding the Psalms in the Cottonian MS. (A translation of this treatise is similarly inserted in Matthew Parker’s Bible.) The Bibliothecarius obtained works for insertion into the collection both from the Fathers of the Church and also from Hellenistic Jews, from whom must have been obtained the Greek text of the first Book of Maccabees, the Aramaic original of which was till extant in St. Jerome’s days. There was, however, always among the Fathers and Bishops of the Church a tacit acknowledgment of the inspired books, as of authority, in contra- distinction to all other books in the Bibliotheca ; these other books being also, in process of time, be a quotation from Isaiah, and cannot be, as some suggest, from a liturgy. The formula, as it is written , used by an inspired writer, stamps the book from which he quotes as being inspired Scripture. PATHS TO DWELL IN. 35 further divided into dvriXeyopera, questionable, and a7TOhpv(f)a, boobs for private reading, but it does not appear that this was done by any decision of the collective Church, but by common, perhaps not universal, consent. St. Jerome opens his celebrated “ Prologus Ga- leatus ” with the theory of an equal number of books in the Hebrew Scriptures and of letters in the Hebrew alphabet ; with the refinement on the theory which required that, as five of the Hebrew letters had each two forms, initial and final, it was signi- ficant of the division of five books, each into two volumes. St. Jerome tabulates the canon of Scripture very much as the council at Carthage did ; and as St. Augustine, who was present at the council, V does in his book “ He Hoctrina Christiana.” But St. Jerome writes as an individual, not citing any council as giving the authority of the collective Church for his statements ; and the present question is as to the action of the collective Church, not of individuals, in taking over the Old Testament. However, St. Jerome, in his preface to the book “ Judith,” tells us that he translated that book 3 6 THE RESTORATION OF because be read that the Nicene Synod reckoned it part of Holy Scripture : “ Ilunc librum numero sanctarum Scripturarum legitur computasse T There must have been, therefore, at least a tradition that a canon of Scripture was recognised by the Fathers at that council ; but we observe that the Church of England, in her sixth article, justifies her canon, not by appeal to any council, but by the assertion that there was never any doubt in the Church of the authority of the books enumerated. The Apostles knew that the Church of the New Covenant had succeeded to the inheritance of the vineyard from which the Jews had been ejected, and that consequently the muniments of the Old Cove- nant belonged to the Church. In whatever other respects the Jewish Church had been unfaithful, it had certainly been not merely passively faithful, but extremely diligent, in preserving the Scriptures whole and uncorrupted. What is sought for in the ancient Christian Church is some proof of collective authority in taking over the Jewish Scriptures, certifying what were those books ; an act unnecessary, indeed, so long as the Church preached Christ to the Jews exclu- PATHS TO DWELL IN. 37 sively, for they never denied their sacred hooks ; but of the first importance when the Church ad- dressed herself to the Gentiles, who knew not those books, and, on account of the opposition of the Jews, required the Gentiles to believe that the Church of Christ understood the Scriptures of the Church of Levi better than the Levites themselves did. The acute Tertullian perceived the necessity of showing that Christians and Jews both agreed as to what were the Jewish Scriptures, for after referring inquirers to the Hebrew Scriptures, and the Greek version of them still in the Serapeion, he adds, “ sect et Juclcei palam lectitant to show that the Greek version was recognised as Scripture, not by the Church only, but openly by the J ews. Probably some porch of the Serapeion was used as a synagogue by the Alexandrian Jews, for per- mission to use which they paid some tax, and to this Tertullian alludes when he says, “ Juclcei palam lectitant, vectigalis libertas, i'u 7 go aditar omnibus sab - batis.” (Apol. c. 18.) It is obvious that the opposing arguments of the Jews could be much better met in the presence of the Gentiles, on many points, by showing the una- THE RESTORATION OF 3* nimity of J ews and Christians concerning the ancient Scriptures, than by charging the Jews with having mutilated the Scriptures in order to deprive the Church of texts telling in favour of the doctrines which she preached to the Gentiles. But this Justin Martyr does ; he charges the Jews with having struck out of the Septuagint Jeremiah the following passage: ifiv))a6q ce Kvpios 6 Geo? cr/rd lopaf/A TWV VSKpwV UVTOV TWV KEKOipi\pj,eVWV EIS yi]V ^WpLGLTOS, kcu KCLTeprj 7r po? airrom' EvayyeXLaaaOai clvtol ? to (Twriipiov avrov. — (Dial, cum Tryphone, c. 72.) If this passage was ever found in the Septuagint, it certainly is not found in the Hebrew text. Justin Martyr’s statement concerning it is cited here to show the need that there was of establishing, by testimony of the Church, not only the number of canonical hooks, but also a certified text of their contents. Origen laboured at restoring a correct text of the Septuagint. His work was that of an individual, and it does not appear that the Church concerned itself to sanction a canonical text ; and an obser- vation by St. Jerome leads us to suppose that, at Alexandria, a text edited by Hesychius (not the PATHS TO DWELL LN. 39 lexicographer) was preferred ; at Constantinople, a text revised by Lucian, the martyr bishop. But the labours, bestowed by holy and zealous men on the Old Testament, were labours, not on the Hebrew, but on the Greek Alexandrian version of the original made about three centuries before Christ ; and even of this version we do not find that any Catholic text was recognised. The Jews, meantime, bad even increased in dili- gence in securing the Hebrew text from possible depravation, and in fixing it, by various contri- vances, such as that of numbering the verses and words in every book, and especially by signifying the received pronunciation of the words, on which their very meaning often depends exclusively, by a system of vowel-points and accents, combining the \ methods of vocalisation, musical notation, and punc- tuation, which about the same time, probably in the fifth century, began to be invented. St. Jerome, by bis individual authority and pri- vate judgment , pronounced on the canon, and pro- duced a Latin text, much as Luther, under the same conditions, produced a German Bible and banished the Apocrypha from the canon. Something like 40 THE RESTORATION 0E infallibility was tacitly attributed to St. Jerome as a translator of Scripture and orderer of the canon, and for twelve centuries bis version was left to take care of itself. Considering bow popular some Apocryphal Gos- pels bad by that time become, especially in Egypt, it is surprising that the question of a canon of Scrip- ture did not claim the attention of the great council at Nicaea. It might have served the truth better, if, instead of laboriously defining the precedence of patriarchs, the council had defined the canonical books of the Bibliotheca. The discussion of the question, t A pei^wv, “ who shall be the greatest,” which our Lord had deprecated, surged up in the council ; and concern for the Scriptures has been too often subordinated to vain j anglings about prece- dence of bishops in the councils of the Collective Church. Hence it is so difficult to ascertain when the Collective Church ever took over the Jewish Scriptures, and what books they sanctioned. The ancient Jews divided their sacred books into the Law , the Writings , and the Prophets . In later times, the masters of the Cabbala decided on reckon- ing the sacred books as twenty-two in number, that PATHS TO DWELL IN. 4 1 there might be one for every letter of the Hebrew alphabet. Josephus, who had no more than a tincture of Rabbinical knowledge, having asserted twenty-two books of Scripture, Eusebius quotes him on the point as of authority. The council at Laodicea, a.d. 372, first canonises twenty-two books of the Old Testament, ignoring the Apocrypha. The council at Carthage, twenty years later, admits Tobit, Wisdom, two books of Maccabees. But although we thus, at last, find the Church in council caring for a catalogue of the books of Scrip- ture, we do not find any steps taken for ensuring an authentic and catholic text of the books. We must suppose that individual bishops concerned them- selves, each in his province, to sanction the text of the Old Testament Scriptures used by his clergy. St. Gregory of Nyssa speaks of drriypa(j)CL aKpipefTTctra, most correct copies, and St. Augustine gives the preference to one reading because he finds it in exemplaribus probatioribus ; but such expres- sions show the need, not the existence, of a standard text in the Church. Tertullian, however, says, nos edimus Evangelia, 42 THE RESTORATION OF we set forth gospels, when refuting the corrupted Gospels circulated by heretics ; and speaks of genuine texts as nostri libri ; and undoubtedly the text and the canon of the New Testament was more cared for than were those of the Old. The Gospels w T ere enthroned in the place where a council was held. The Old Testament rarely seems to have been appealed to in early councils, but at the pseudo- oecumenical Nicene, in the eighth century, pas- sages relating to the cherubim over the mercy -seat were adduced as attesting the efficacy of images in churches. The fact that these cherubim never could be seen does not appear to have occurred to the council. It was not till the council at Trent that the Vulgate was canonised, in the fourth session, April, 1546 ; and by a prescript the council entrusted the production of an authoritative text to the Bishop of Borne. In 1590 such a text was published, but was found unsatisfactory, and two years afterwards Clement VIII. issued and sanctioned a Latin text of the Scriptures for use in the Boman obedience. It inclines to the Septuagint rather than to the Hebrew sense. PATHS TO DWELL IN. 43 The Franciscan, Richard du Mans, had urged on the council that no promulgation of the Scrip- tures was needed, the scholastic theology being sufficient to prove all truths and dogmas. But ecclesiastical authority, armed with the weapons of the schoolmen, had long trodden down and robbed the Scriptures ; the cup had been stolen from the Gospel apparatus of the Eucharist; the power of binding and loosing had been purloined from the Apostles, and offered for sale in the shape of in- dulgences to the people by the thieves ; the Scriptures had fallen among thieves, who had left it half dead. The Augustinian Luther may have been a rough and uncourtly man compared with the polished Franciscan Richard du Mans ; some still would revile Luther as a Samaritan compared with the \ mediaeval bishops and doctors ; but all must grant that he was the good Samaritan to the Scriptures. By translating them into his own language he, as it were, set them on his own beast. The English authorised version, 1611, by coming closer to the Hebrew than any other, surpasses all translations and editions of the Old Testament, and has acquired an oecumenical estimation as 44 THE RESTORATION OF giving most faithfully the sense of the Scriptures ; which sense, and not the letter, is the Word from God. If the English version has proved a mother of discordant opinion, it has been so because the translation which it gives of the Old Testament was not followed by an authorised interpreta- tion ; besetting slothfulness was only too ready to accept it as final, and us sparing the Church any further trouble about the meaning of Scrip- ture ; and the authorised version was accepted without demur in England, as an Act of Parliament is accepted, which the people often understand one way, and which the learned in the law interpret in a different way, in places. After the appearance of the authorised version, it fared in England with the study of the original language of Scripture as, after Newton’s experiment with the prism, it fared with the investigation of the properties of light. When Newton had laid down the prism, no one handled it again for a century. Newton was held to have seen in the spectrum all that was to be seen, and to have done with the prism all that could be done, or needed to be done. So PATHS TO DWELL LN . 45 King James’s translators were willingly thought to have done all that was required, and to have seen in the Hebrew Scriptures ail that was to be seen in them. But, in fact, they had done little more, when they published their translation, than prepare and collect appliances, tools, and scaffolding, as it were, for the construction of an interpretation. It must be borne in mind that the framers of the English version were bound to work after a certain scheme, which was not such as a critic and scholar could sanction. The Hebrew text and the sun meanwdiile have re- mained unaltered ; but since the days of Newton the sun, through a prism more cunningly manipulated, has disclosed properties in its light more than he de- tected. It needed but to make the prism revolve in the ray, and light disclosed its property, called its polarizability ; when a needle was immersed in the purple ray, the sun disclosed his magnetising power. Language, since the days of King James’s translators, has been manipulated with even greater results than the prism since the days of Newton, and the Hebrew text will now interpret itself to the philo- logist more fruitfully than it did to them. When the Jewish Scriptures were taken over at 46 THE RESTORATION OF last, in the fourth century, by the Church in coun- cil ; as that council sat at Carthage, it is reasonable to suppose that it had in view the version of the books in the African Latin Bibliotheca made from the Greek Septuagint version. The next council which sanctioned a canon of Scripture, that at Laodicea, must have had in view a Greek Septuagint text. But in both cases it was substantially a version of the Old Testament, made by the Jews three centuries before Christ, which the Church took over without any thought of confronting it with the original, or of inquiring whether a version made by J ews could have in it that light which a version made by the Church would have exhibited. Undoubtedly we may recognise a dispensation of Divine Providence in the fact that the testimony out of the Old Testament laid before the Greek- speaking Jews was out of a version made by Jews so long- before Christ was born, and one which had been sanctioned by the Jewish Church ; for its text was evidence more unanswerable by them than if it had been the work of apostles or of any Christians. But though this was providentially so ordered, PATHS TO DWELL IN. 47 and though that version best served that most im- portant purpose, the Old Testament is for other pur- poses besides that of persuading the Jews concerning Christ out of their own Scriptures. It is the Word of God to all nations, and is capable of confirming faith in Christ among people who do not inherit, as the Jews do, an expectation of Him, grounding that expectation on the ancient prophecies of the Old Testament. It is profitable to nations whose prejudices, prepossessions, mental peculiarities and habits are dissimilar to those of the Jews. Every Jewish interpreter interpreted the Lord as the God of the Jew exclusively ; a Christian inter- preter would discern in the Lord the God and Father of all men indifferently. It is possible that if the Church had betaken her- self to interpret the Old Testament with the spirit which she had received, so catholic a view of the dispensations of the Almighty would have been dis- closed, that the Church might have been spared Marcion’s slanderous cavils against the ways of the Lord, and the pestilent blasphemies of Manes, who thought he saw a destroyer in the Lord as revealed in the Old Testament. 4 8 THE RESTORATION 01 What the ancient Church had not leisure to do should be done ; the Church should pass by the Jewish Greek translators into the very Hebrew original, and view the Old Testament Scriptures, not by the light of the lamps of the Temple, but by the light of the Gospel, and set it forth as it discloses itself when illuminated by the Spirit of Christ. 4. It has also happened that the Church of Christ has the Old Testament Scriptures in a text in exactly the same condition of arrangement which they exhibited when published by Ezra, and used by the J ews for some centuries before Christ. The Jews scrupulously refrained from correcting the misplacement or malformation of a letter when copying a roll of recognised genuineness and anti- quity. The Christian has equally refrained from transposing paragraphs obviously misplaced, and from displacing a paragraph accidentally inserted in a place or book to which it does not belong. The dislocations of the text are such that he who would understand what he reads must either frame an order of sequence for himself, or adopt one sug- gested by some biblical critic. Whilst studious men PATHS TO DWELL LN. 49 are obliged to do this for themselves, and average readers do not suspect that it is needed, the Church has stood for long years looking on captiously at the student who makes experiments at a rearrange- ment of the text, and unconcernedly at the general reader who makes what he can out of a confused narrative ; whilst popular commentators over-tax their ingenuity in attempting to dovetail together paragraphs which have no connection in reality. The result sometimes is a confusion of doctrine, sometimes of moralitv, stumbling-blocks to the reader, and opportunities to the scoffer. For instance, in the book of the law as it now stands, the law of divorce and the law of marriage run parallel. The impression given by the common arrangement of the text is that the law contem- plated divorce at the time that it hallowed marriage, for Exodus xxi. 10, referring to concubines and divorce, is placed as though it were a supplement to the seventh Commandment. Our Lord himself had to interpose on this point, and tell the Jewish ex- pounders of the law that marriage had been from the beginning, but divorce tolerated only on account of the inveterate perverseness, hardness of heart , of E 50 THE RESTORATION OF the people. But the Jews had the book of the law, as we have, in such a disordered arrangement that they naturally supposed divorce as lawful a thing as marriage. It seems reasonable to presume that in very ancient times, long before the Captivity, the various precepts in the book Exodus were arranged in such order as to exhibit precepts and statutes, mishpatim, provided for particular cases of infraction of a law, in juxtaposition with the original law ; so that the book was made one of ready reference for the judge who had to decide cases. Such an arrangement of the book would be of great utility in the Jewish commonwealth, but worse than use- less in the Christian Church and community. The Temple copy exhibiting the original order and continuity would decay or perish, and the only copies current would be those used by the judges on their circuits, or by the priests in adjudicating. Copies in this form only would come into Ezra’s hands. If this view is reasonable, a rearrangement — re- edition — of the book Exodus can be undertaken on a fixed principle and carried out methodically. A PATHS TO DWELL IN. 51 clue to tlie primitive order being found, its recovery, the readjustment of the members of tbe book, is pos- sible, and tbe attempt to do it is justified. 5. Many bave satisfied themselves, as regards tbe apparent incompatibility of our Lord’s precepts with some of those sanctioned in the Old Testament, by a vague supposition that tbe Lord, finding tbe law to bave failed, changed tbe Spirit with which He bad dealt with man when He sent tbe Saviour into tbe world. Some such notion as this is probably still tbe refuge of many who feel at times perplexed on tbe subject. Many bave been told that if they stumbled at an apparent inconsistency of Spirit in two places, they staggered for want of faith ; whereas, in some cases, it was from a clear-sighted faith in Christ, as tbe manifestor of tbe nature of God, that they w T ere able to perceive that there did lie a stumbbng-block in tbe way, unremoved. And such would never bave been left if tbe Church, on admitting the Jewish rolls into her muniments, bad stirred up tbe spirit within her, and by tbe light of tbe Gospel bad made tbe rough places smooth and tbe crooked places straight for tbe footsteps of believers in Christ- 52 THE RESTORATION OF Some places are crooked and rough, not from imperfect translation, but because the Jews so dis- posed the materials and component parts of Scrip- ture as to encumber the way to the eternal moral law by interposing the apparatus of the temporary ceremonial law. The Gospel gives the Church light by which to see this, and the Spirit gives her strength and authority to take up the stumbling-block out of the way of the people of the Lord (Is. lvii. 14), and set everything in its proper place. Such a work would be a re-editing of the Scrip- tures, having for its object the restoration of the original sequence of its component parts. Until this order is, as far as possible, recovered, mere translating, the more accurate it is, the more clearly will it show the want of consecutiveness in many places. No one would take up the Scriptures to re-edit them as he would take up any mere book. The Church, contemplating the work, would think how great must have been the reverence and awe with which the angels, at the Lord’s resurrection, dis- posed decently and in order the fine linen in which he Lord’s body had been wrapped, and the napkin PATHS TO DWELL LN. 53 that had been round his head. The Old Testament would he to her like the one, the New Testament of her Head like the other. But none can expect the Church to undertake the work unless it appears, not only that there has evidently been a confused folding as it were of the original rolls, but also that they had been so dis- arranged for some temporary purpose, which pur- pose, having no longer any place, reason requires that they should be restored to their original order of arrangement or sequence of component parts. It is presumed that a view of that portion of the book Exodus, which treats of the law, will show that there can be discerned in the present form of the book a disarrangement on the face of the record ; and that a consideration of the use to which the book was applied by the Jews accounts satisfactorily for many transpositions of the matter of the original book. The notion that the text of Exodus has at some early period been disposed, without regard to its original order, so as to make the book a code of laws and collection of cases, is strengthened by our ob- serving that whilst its present arrangement is very 54 THE RESTORATION OF suitable for such a purpose, it is perfectly useless for the purposes of ready historical reference for the sequence of facts. The narrative, not needed for practical purposes, has been sacrificed to the legisla- tion which was continually required for practical application. This is apparent when we notice that, if we read the book for the sake of the narrative, it is so confused that Moses is described as writing all the words of the law in a book, and binding the people to observe it, before he had ascended into the mount, as he was desired to do, that he might be taught the law. When such things are well considered, since we know that it is possible to have a number of sen- tences so arranged that, however accurately each individually may be translated, their arrangement orderly gives one view of the subject, their trans- posed arrangement, another ; it becomes a question whether it is not of as great importance to endeavour to recover the original arrangement as to recover the real meaning of the several passages. It is quite possible, some will say it is evident, that the present arrangement perniciously amalgamates the moral law with statutes suffered but not approved PATHS TO DWELL IN. 55 of. If this is so, then a re-editing of the hook Exodus, the restoration of the text to its proper order, is of more importance than the revision of a good translation of it. The replacement of the matter in the book Exodus into its original order is a thing of far more importance than any concern for the order in which the paragraphs in the other hooks of the Pentateuch stand. For in Exodus the separate and distinct sources of the moral, and of the ceremonial law, are indicated, or would be, if the order of events governed the order of the matter. As it now reads, it is really an exemplification of the confused condition of mind in which the Jews lived ; for their history abundantly shows that they strove to satisfy the conditions of the moral law by observing the enactments of the cere- monial law. They were aware that the inside of the cup and platter required to be made clean, but they sought to do so by bestowing care on the out- side. Now that the kingdom of God has been given to the Gentiles, and now that all nations are invited to enter into it, it is above all things necessary that it 56 THE RESTORATION OF should be made to appear, as plainly as it did at first, that the Lord set forth the moral law for His people, wherever and in whatever nation such might be found. Those to whom He spake it He called “ My people.” But the ceremonial law was im- posed on those whom the Lord called the people of Moses : “ Thy people , whom thou broughtest up out of the land of Egypt.” (Exod. xxxii. 7). Such a view and apprehension of the case justifies the student of the Old Testament in viewing the rule of Levi as an unsubstantial parable, and enables the learner of the will of God to pass directly from the text of the moral law published on Mount Sinai to its exposition and practical application published by our Lord on the Mount of Beatitudes. PATHS TO DWELL IN. 57 III. 1. Argument in favour of rearranging the book Exodus. — • 2. Evidence of disarrangement in it. — 3. Its present order in- jurious to the right understanding of it. — 4. No Levitical or- dinances till Moses had made a second abode on Mount Sinai. — 5. Plea for a better ordering of the book. 1. If it should ever happen in future ages that a hook should be compiled and published in which the history of the ecclesiastical movement in Ger- many in the sixteenth century was narrated by interpolating the confession of faith exhibited at the Diet of Augsburg with the decrees promulgated at the Council of Trent, the book so published would be, as regards confusion of matter, a counterpart to the present text of the book Exodus ; for by a similar confusion of matter the first abode of Moses on Mount Sinai and the eternal moral law then re- enacted, are interpolated with passages describing his second abode on the mount, and the subsequent temporal institutions of the Levitical Code. 58 THE RESTORATION OF Such is the chaotic condition of the text of Exodus, such it had been long before the days of Ezra. Reasons can be offered showing that its disarrange- ment can be plausibly accounted for ; and that its contents have been transposed, not without method. To understand how a disarrangement, destructive of the thread of the narrative and confusing the moral with the ceremonial law, could be tolerated among the ancient Jews requires us to conceive, as well as we can, the condition of the ancient Jews with respect to literature. For many ages the Jews (Israelites and Hebrews) had no conception of any but one book, the work of Moses, kept in secluded custody by the priests, a book which the people never handled, used, or saw ; one, which if they could have read it they could not have understood without the priest’s special guidance. Such a society knew nothing either of the original order of matters in the book, or of any subsequent different disposal of the matters. The book Exodus for instance, was of use only to the priest and judge, and it could be the more useful to the priest if the portions referring to his daily ministrations were gathered out from their detached situations, and PATHS TO DWELL IN. 59 copied collectively into a priest’s book, Leviticus ; to tlie judge, if particular cases were inserted after the original general law, not in the order of time in which they first arose and were first decided. This supposition accounts for its present unliterary dis- arrangement, and also to suggest a process by which its original order of matter may be recovered. The Books of Moses were neither handbooks of morality or of history to the ancient Jews. The priest, when consulted, taught them what was morally right and ceremonially proper. But in their habitual lives they were governed by a folk-lore, consisting not in citations from the Scriptures, but in maxims, spoken of in Scripture as the proverbs of the ancients (1 Sam. xxiv. 13) ; of moral import, as the one cited, \ Wickedness proceedeth from the wicked; or con- cerning prudence, as the proverb cited by the wise woman of Abel, they ivere wont to speak in old time , saying, they shall ask counsel at Abel (2 Sam. xx. 18). So in the book Numbers, xxi. 27, toe read, they that speak in proverbs say, &c., where the proverb is in the form of a national ballad. Ezekiel even in his days speaks of every one that useth a proverb 6o THE RESTORATION OF (xvi. 44), in which place, as in the former, allusion seems made to popular legendary compositions, such as were the hook of the wars of the Lord alluded to (Num. xxi. 14) ; or to the legends preserved and re- peated by the professional story tellers who exhibited their narrative powers to those who frequented the wells, at the places of drawing water , and at the town gates, where they rehearsed the righteous acts of the Lord (Judges v. 11.). As regards that portion of the folk-lore of the ancient Jews which bore on moral and social life, some of it may have been a residuum of the wisdom of Egypt (Acts vii. 22), which their ancestors had known and which had been handed down as house- hold words in families. As regards the legends and ballads of an historical nature, Scripture gives us reasons for knowing that Scripture itself owes nothing to them, but they owe the germs of fact which they contain to facts recorded in Scripture. And notions of their past history, and of the doings of their ancestors, and of the interpositions of the Lord on behalf of their nation, amplified by much detail, more or less true, were widely diffused among the people ; and if they heard the truthful Scripture PATHS TO DWELL IN. 6 1 narrative from a priest or prophet, they involuntarily interpreted it in the sense of the popular tradition. Every race of men does similarly. The mere bare truth itself is a plant of very weak vitality on earth, but a truth impregnated by a fiction yields a progeny of legends which are inera- dicably vital. No Jew who set himself to interpret the Scriptures as the Alexandrian translator did, could divest his mind altogether of the colouring which legend-lore had given to the Scripture narra- tive in his eyes, as no mediaeval Eabbi could ex- pound Scripture without being biassed by the in- fluence of the Talmud legends, in which probably the ancient legends reappear but in a gross form. We hear of no public reading of Moses till long after the days of Ezra, when the synagogue appeared in which Moses and the prophets were read ; then a book such as Exodus was serviceable for the required reading, whatever order the matter stood in, for the lessons read were but very short extracts ; chrono- logical sequence in the narrative was immaterial ; and the people knew the law only as altogether ceremonial, so that the amalgamation of a moral law with it was not suspected. 62 THE RESTORATION OF The essentials to an orthodox reading of the Scrip- ture were, that it should be read from the square character, the canonical form of letter, in the Hebrew tongue ; and if so heard, whether interpreted by the synagogue interpreter or not, the Scripture was con- sidered as heard. For the reasons stated, a derange- ment of the matter in Exodus, or some other book, might exist, and yet remain unknown to the ancient Jews, and unsuspected eyen by those of more educated and later generations. But if the Jews had known the fact it is extremely probable that the later race of Lawmen would have disposed the matter so as to remedy the disorder. For, judging by the form of the MSS. of the Septuagint, we conclude that the latter portions of the book Exodus, those treating of the tabernacle and its furniture, came into the hands of those translators in a yery disordered condition of arrangement ; but when Origen betook himself to edit the Septuagint, he found the Hebrew text at that part in as much order as that which it now exhibits ; and by it, as by a mould, he reduced 'the Septuagint to the Hebrew order. If the Hebrew text had been in that order in the days of the Septuagint, why did they not follow it ? Why are the Septuagint PATHS TO DWELL IN. 63 MSS. all so confused at the place ? Probably in their time it had not been reduced to order, and we may suppose that Hillel or some great master in Israel brought the Hebrew text to the order in ewhich it has ever since stood. The ancient Jews, unlike the later Babbin, suffered common sense and the requirements of right reason to direct their labours in copying and preserving the Scriptures. 2. If Moses received instructions to write and publish a law and ordinances on his first abode in the mount, the fact has not been recorded ; his breaking of the Tables abrogated his other instructions. But on his second abode on the mount, it is fully recorded (Exod. xxxiv. 10), Behold, I make a covenant ; the % terms are thus summarily stated, One Grod to be worshipped ; idolatry to be extirpated ; the Passover, the Sabbath, and the three great festivals of the Jewish year to be observed; and it is added, Write thou these words, for after the tenor of these words I have made a covenant with thee and with Israel. And the Apostle to the Hebrews (ix.) having mentioned that the first covenant had ordinances of divine service and a worldly sanctuary, says, when Noses had spoken (or 6 + THE RESTORATION OF written) every precept to all the people , he took blood and sprinkled the book and all the people (ver. 19). It is difficult to understand how this can be any other ratification than that which is recorded (Exod. xxiv.). And Moses ivrote all the words of the Lord . . . . and* took the book of the covenant , and read it in the ears of the people .... and took blood, and sprinkled it on the people, and said, Behold the blood of the covenant, which the Lord hath made with you (ver. 4, 7, 8.) This must refer to the Lord’s words, write thou these words, for after the tenor of these words I have made a covenant with thee and with Israel, spoken on Moses’ second abode on the Mount (chap, xxxiv. 27) ; hut the writing then commanded and the ratifica- tion of the covenant made, are inserted, as the book now stands, among details of his preparation for his first ascent into it. Or there must have been two books written of two distinct covenants, that of works, the moral law, and that of ordi- nances, the law ministered to by Levi. Which it is not unreasonable to suppose. But if so, the two are so intermingled and confused by the pre- sent order of the text that they cannot be dis- cerned one from the other, a confusion most in- PATHS TO DWELL IN. 65 jurious to those who would apprehend the Divine dispensations. Our Lord approved the saying that the observance of the moral law was better than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices : and the prophets and in- spired men laboured to live in the moral law, and to impress it as what the Lord required (Micah vi. 8) ; we read that to obey is better than sacrifice, and David says, thou requirest no sacrifice — the sacrifices of God are a broken spirit, i.e. human wilfulness sub- dued to the will of God. As the hook Exodus is now ordered, we are required to believe that Moses wrote the Book of the Cove- nant before he had been commanded to do so ; but wrote none after he had been instructed to do it. We also notice that after Moses came down from his second abode on the mount, with commandment to publish the covenant then made, the narrative in its present order fitly describes the appearance of Moses, his calling the people to him, his gathering all the congregation and saying unto them, These are the words that the Lord hath commanded, that ye should do them (xxxv. 1), where we should naturally ex- pect to find the terms of the covenant detailed ; hut F 66 THE RESTORATION OF if we would discover them, we must look elsewhere, and pick them up in fragments here and there, for nothing follows the solemn exordium above cited except a ceremonial injunction to kindle no fire in houses on the Sabbath ; a sequel hardly clignum tanto hiatu. The first four Books of Moses are one continuous volume ; there is no break in narrative or in diction between Genesis and Exodus, or between Exodus and Leviticus, only at the Book of Numbers the sub- ject passes from the statutes of religion to the taking of a census of the people. Patriarchal sacrifices continue till the covenant is ratified, the blood sprinkled on the book was from a sacrifice of the Patriarchal, not of the Levitical manner and order. Levi is put into office, and consequently in the book Deuteronomy, written about forty years after, we find the priests the sons of Levi, the Levites, men- tioned as keepers of the sacred records (Deut. xxxi. 9). Moses, who, before he had been called and in- spired, teas not eloquent , but slow of speech and of a slow tongue (Exod. iv. 10), after the Lord had been forty years with his mouth, teaching him what to PATHS TO DWELL IN. 67 say (Exod. iv. 12), had come to surpass in elo- quence all who ever spoke ; at the time when he wrote what we read in Deuteronomy ; for there is no written language so sublime, powerful, and pathetic as the language of Moses in that book ; and yet the reader is compelled to acknowledge that it is the same man who had witnessed, suffered, and recorded all that is recorded in the preceding hooks. As regards the first four hooks, they have been most uncritically and mechanically divided, especially the first three, with the same disregard to con- tinuity as is apparent in the division of the matter into chapters. But this, though an unhappiness, is not the positive evil caused in the book Exodus, by the confusion of the record of the Lord’s dealing with those whom he spoke of to Moses as my people, with the same when he had degraded them so that he recognised them only as thy people , when he spoke of them to Moses ; and by the uncertain ordering of the various paragraphs, so that the reader cannot know whether he is to refer what is recorded to the first or to the second visit of Moses to Mount Sinai. The texture of the book is like that of a garment mingled of linen and woollen , its surface is a field sown with mingled seed. 68 THE RESTORATION OF H Before it is condemned as a most presumptuous, if not sacrilegious act to dismember and rearrange the text of Exodus, it must be borne in mind that no omission nor change of a letter even is contemplated ; that the Church itself cannot affirm that we have the book in the order in which Moses disposed its contents ; that it has been at the mercy of a priest- hood who misunderstood its purport as much as they reverenced its materials; that the understanding of it has been reserved to the Church (1 St. Peter i. 12) ; that the claims of a better knowledge of its language have been admitted as justifying a better translation of its text, and that therefore an Evan- gelical conception of its purport and of the dispensa- tions of the Lord in instructing and dealing with his people has claims to be heard, when it is proposed to set forth the book of the law in an order symmetrical with the doctrines of the Church respecting the moral, the Levitical, and the social ceremonial laws. Had this been done at first, the Church would have been spared many confusions. The work is not suggested as a method of conciliat- ing the opponents of mysteries by yielding part of their demands, which would be a hopeless and wicked PATHS TO DWELL IN. 69 attempt ; but by lawfully setting forth the book in a form more like its primitive order ; to set up the hul- warks of Zion, and render her less easily assailable. Nor is it supposed that the work, if done, would make Scripture a narrative merely for the under- standing by removing any mysteries requiring faith. All who are conversant with elucidations of Scripture know, that what is most clearly elucidated by sober study has a mystery in every saying in it. If it can be shown that its original order has been disarranged, and that by such disarrange- ment the reader is exposed seriously to misconceive the dispensations of the Lord, even if no account can be given of the causes of such dislocation of passages, the Church, when retranslating, can hardly justify herself for permitting the text to go forth again in its present order. If it can be shown that in places the original order of the text has been changed into another, to serve some temporary useful purpose, that purpose being known, a solution of the difficulty is found, and the way to recovering the original / i» order is indicated. As an instance of a disarrangement of matter evident from the context and injurious to the mean- 7° THE RESTORATION OF ing of the record, a passage may be found, Exod. xxiv. 4, 7, 8. We there read that the Lord said unto Moses , come thou up, &c., and Moses wrote all the words of the Lord, and read the hook in the audience of the people, and took blood and sprinkled it on the people, and on the book (Heb. ix. 19). Then went Moses up, &c. A marginal note in Matthew Parker’s Bible shows that the author of the version perceived a palpable dehiscence and consequent want of connection in the text at this place (Exod. xxiv. 1) ; accordingly the passage is made to say, The Lord had said unto Moses, come up, &c., instead of the Lord said, and the note explains that it was said when the Lord had ended speaking the commandments (chap. xx.). This is the true solution of the difficulty, and its practical remedy is the removal of the interposed matter to its proper place. The Hebrew verb is not in a state to justify its being translated had said, though the English version has so translated it (Glen. xii. 1).* * An unhappy effect of substituting a pluperfect for a perfect tense occurs in Isaiah xxvi. 15. “ Thou hast increased the nation, thou art glorified, thou hadst removed it far away unto the ends of the earth.” The Hebrew seems to say, Thou hast added to the nation, thou hast set back every boundary of the land, that is to say, enlarged its dwelling-place. See Isaiah liv. 2. PATHS TO DWELL IN. 71 If we accept the present order of the text as original, and as the order of events, then we must believe that we are told in Scripture that Moses taught the law before he had been taught by the Lord ; w T rote it before he had been commanded to do so ; and ratified it before ever he had been into the mountain ; before he had received the first tables written by the Lord Himself. For then, says the English text, then went Moses up, and he returns with the first tables of the law in the 32nd chapter. The note of time then, as though it was not until then, is a gratuitous insertion by the authors of the English version ; there is no mark of time in the Hebrew, nor in the Septuagint, nor in the Vulgate, but transla- tors must have supplied it, pressed by the manifest want of continuity in the text before them. Scripture, no doubt, abounds in dark sayings and in mysteries hard to be understood, and it would be mere arrogancy to alter a saying, dark to us, so as to bring it within the reach of our understanding. But a my stery is not confusion, nor is it a thing without form, but some parts of the Book of Exodus, like many others, are confused and without form, and need the Spirit to make them into shape. 7 2 THE RESTORATION OF 3. The imperfection of its present arrangement is not like that, sometimes unavoidable in narrative, caused by the anticipating a subsequent event ; for the dislocation of passages under consideration actually dates the ratification of the ceremonial law as having taken place before the moral law had been given. The result to the reader has been that the ceremonial law has been made part of the moral law ; and the dealings of the Almighty with the people, after they had preferred the golden calf to the Lord, are mixed up with his dealings with the people, while as yet they had not broken his covenant. It is as if the account of Adam’s disobedience was set before the command given him to dress and keep the garden. In the case of a manifest displacement of passages, destructive of the order of the narrative, and in- jurious to the meaning of Scripture, it seems un- reasonable to say that the reverence due to Scripture forbids the alteration required ; for it is not the intention of the Spirit which dictated the Scriptures to put stumbling-blocks in the way of the wayfaring man. It is, on the contrary, distinctly promised by the Spirit that when that light that lighteth every man PATHS TO DWELL IN. 73 who cometh into the world should have come, there shall he a highway and a way , called the way of holiness, such that wayfaring men , though fools , shall not err therein (Is. xxxv. 8). But if by reverence for Scripture is meant rever- ence for that arrangement of the letter and text in which the J ews arranged it ; such reverence is rather comparable to the superstitious regard of the Bab bin for special forms for particular letters ; they believed that the casual distortion of a letter in the text was given to it by inspiration, and that it indicated a mystery ; and where an essential letter has manifestly been omitted or altered by a lapse of the copyist, refused ever to readmit it into the ketib, the written text, but allowed it to be sounded in the qeri, or text as read. In the rearrangement of the text contemplated as re-editing of it, no alteration or omission of one jot or tittle is contemplated ; but only such transpositions of paragraphs as the sense and doctrine both require, and which the grammar of the original Hebrew allows, if it does not suggest, and which the context loudly demands. The doctrine, or rather the fact, necessitating 74 THE RESTORATION OF a new arrangement of the contents of the hook Exodus is, that the moral law must he kept distinct from and free from admixture with the ceremonial law ; consequently, the first abode of Moses on the mount, must he kept separate from his second ad- mission to it, in the narrative. Scripture supplies us with abundant evidence enabling us to discern what belongs to the moral law, first given, and what belongs to the ceremonial law afterwards instituted, and by this information we can sift out the one from the other. The Lord draws the distinction between the moral law and the ceremonial law, showing that the difference between them was priority of insti- tution and absence of ordinances in the moral law, as we read I spake not unto your fathers nor com- manded them , in the day that I brought them out of the land of Egypt, concerning burnt offerings or sacri- fices : but this thing commanded I them , saying, Obey my voice, and I will be your God, and ye shall be my people ; and walk ye in all the ways that I have com- manded you (Jer. vii. 22, 23). If this place in Scripture is well weighed, it will appear that the argument is, that an observance of the ceremonial law profited nothing if the moral law PATHS TO DWELL IN. 75 was not observed. One observance was that burnt offerings might not be eaten, as peace offerings might ; but the Lord tells the people that if they did not walk in the ways which He commanded, it mattered little or nothing whether they strictly observed such an ordinance of the ceremonial or not. Therefore, the Lord saith, Put your burnt offerings unto your sacrifices (peace offerings) and eat the flesh of both alike (ver. 22) ; for they were a nation that obeyed not the voice of the Lord (ver. 28) ; the voice of the Lord being the commandments which He had spoken with a loud voice. The Lord, by saying that if they walked in all the ways that He commanded them, it should be well ivith them, intimated that they would not then have needed the imposition of a ceremonial law upon them, but that their idolatrous worship of the golden calf had rendered the yoke of ceremonies necessary to curb and control them. The Lord, indeed, on Mount Sinai recalled the people to the faith and practice of Abraham ; con- firming to them the promise He had made to Abraham ; but adding the moral law, because in Egypt they had indulged in an abundance of evil 7 6 THE RESTORATION OF habits, contrary to the principles of Abraham’s faith ; the moral law, therefore, was added that sin might abound , as St. Paul technically expressed the purpose it served ; for it served to show the people that their habits abounded in sins which he forbade. 4. But the Levitical priesthood, burnt offerings and peace offerings, are unknown to that moral law, and had no place in it. Worship by sacrifice dated from the gates of Paradise. The Passover had been instituted already in Egypt. It and circum- cision are neither of them Levitical. The moral law needed not to rehearse these, they were left as they had been. Whatever sacrifices were performed at the foot of Mount Sinai, were not administered to by Levi. Aaron does not appear as a priest, nor the tribe of Levi as sacerdotal, till the second tables of the law had been brought down from the mount and put into the ark ; I put the tables in the ark ivhich I had made , saith Moses (Deut. x. 5). At that time the Lord separated the tribe of Levi , to bear the ark, to stand before the Lord to minister unto Him, and to bless in his name (ver. 8). We read, ver. 9, that Levi received this office ac- cording as the Lord promised him; but the Hebrew PATHS TO DWELL LN 77 has spoke, not promised , as the Lord spake (to me) concerning him, diber lo, lo here means concerning him as lak is concerning thee (Ps. xci. 11), 7 repl gov (Mat. iv. 6) ; for we do not read that the Lord ever spake to Levi, but that He spake to Moses those things which concerned Levi. The words When Israel went out of Egypt, Judah teas His sanctuary (Ps. cxiv.) may possibly intimate that the priesthood was in Judah at that period and until Levi was put into bffice ; whence we may conclude that the youny men of the children of Israel, who ministered at the sacrifice which Moses offered at the foot of Mount Sinai, were of the tribe of Judah.* * St. Paul tells us that Moses did not spe^ik anything concerning Judah as a sacerdotal tribe, he does not say that Jacob did net when he. prophesied that the sceptre and the lawgiver should be in Judah (Glen. xlix. 10). Jacob deprived Reuben of supremacy, set aside Simeon and Levi for their treachery and cruelty, and set up Judah to receive the' praise of his brethren ; giving that tribe the sceptre until some event happened ; until Shiloh comes, which has been understood to mean until Christ comes , but not by the most ancient translators ; nor do the Evangelists or Prophets ever claim Jacob’s words as prophetic of Christ, though the Apostle could hardly have missed doing so when he wrote it is evident that our Lord sprang out of 78 THE RESTORATION OF In the text, Judah was his sanctuary, the Hebrew copula, was, is so written as to require a feminine nominative, and Judah is masculine, whence some have concluded that daughter of Judah is meant, and that the words have reference to the mother of our Judah (Heb. vii. 14) ; and it is undeniable that the sceptre, instead of departing from the tribe of Judah, returned to that tribe in the person of our Lord the King of the Jews. What is appointed for him , the Septuagint translation of Shiloh, seems to have been the accepted, and to be the true translation ; the Chaldee Targumist does not translate Shiloh by Messiah, as it is sometimes said, but paraphrases the passage as follows, till Messiah comes whose the kingdom is, where Shiloh seems represented by whose is, and Messiah and the Kingdom (words nowhere in the Hebrew) seem interpolated as explanatory. Our Lord’s descent through Judah is not affected by the prophecy ; the Gospel makes our Lord the son of David, who was of the tribe of Judah. It is not to be supposed that the Israelites in Egypt had no priesthood and rites among them, however corrupt these may have become. The Egyptians indeed would not tolerate the sacrificing of oxen, owing to their reverence for the Ox-god, Apis (Exod. viii. 26) : but lambs may have been offered in sacrifice in Egypt. The killing of the lamb for the first Passover seems to have given no offence to the Egyptians. Sacrifices infer a priesthood. Jacob’s prophecy may reasonably be understood as pointing to the deliverance of the people out of Egypt by the expression what is appointed for them ; for when Moses, of the tribe of Levi, was made the lawgiver, the lawgiver certainly was no longer to be found in the tribe of Judah. Though until then it may have been so, it then departed from Judah. PATHS TO DWELL LN 79 Lord. The expression daughter of Judah occurs in Lamentations, where it means the tribe or congre- gation of Judah. 5. The sum of the preceding arguments is, that Levi and the ceremonies of the law had no place till after that Moses had been called up into the mount the second time, and having returned from it, appointed Aaron High Priest, and the Levites priests, and ordered the Tabernacle according to a pattern which had been shown him on the mount, not during his first , but during his second forty days’ abode on it. This conclusion would he obvious were it not that the text of Exodus is now so arranged that many precepts of the ceremonial law appear from it as if delivered immediately after the ten commandments, from Mount Sinai ; as any one may see who will read the 20th and two following chapters consecutively. Yet Moses distinctly tells us that when the Lord had spoken the ten words, commandments, he added no more ; as it is said elsewhere, he spake nothing con- cerning burnt offerings and peace offerings. The ten commandments, the moral law, having been spoken by the Lord, Moses was immediately called 8o THE RESTORATION OF up into Mount Sinai to receive them in writing on stone slabs, and came back after forty days, only to break the tables to pieces, signifying that the dispen- sation of that moral law could not be ratified, the people having revoked their pledge to serve the True God by adopting the golden calf as the image of their god. This moral law covenant was not ratified by the sprinkling of blood on the stone tables of its terms, either then or ever, until it was ratified by the sprink- ling of the blood of Jesus, not on tables of stone, but on the fleshly tables of men’s hearts, on which the Lord writes it (2 Cor. iii. 3). Not that it was abrogated, but it was deferred as to its full publication, till One should come who would fulfil it : and the instruction as to its methods which Moses received during his first abode in Sinai was not disclosed to men in its fulness and spiritual import till Christ opened his mouth and taught it on the Hill of Beati- tudes in the sermon on the mount. Yet flashes of its true light broke out at times from inspired lips, as from Samuel’s, in the words To obey is better than sacrifice, and from David’s Thou, requirest no sacrifice; that is to say, not such as PATHS TO DWELL LN. 8 1 Levi offered, which can never take away sins (Heb. x. ii). We observe also that those solemn sacrifices, such as Samuel offered in Gilgal, David at Araunah’s threshing floor, and Elijah on Mount Carmel, were of the Patriarchal, not of the Levitical type and order. Thus ever the Old Paths and the Moral Law come to light in precept and practice at times, among those who apprehended their universal and unchange- able spirit, and anticipated the day when the Lord should say, Neither on this mountain exclusively, nor at Jerusalem exclusively, shall men worship the Father. It was this moral law which our Lord came to fulfil ; our Lord ignored Levi altogether as one whose ordinances He came to fulfil. He declared that duty towards God and one’s neighbour was the matter and theme of the law and the prophets which He came to fulfil ; and the whole teaching of the prophets is directed to enforcing the moral, not the ceremonial law. Since such is the eminence and separate dignity of the law given on Mount Sinai on the first abode of Moses on the Mount ; such its distinctive and separate dignity should surely not be suffered to lie 82 THE RESTORATION OF buried beneath Levitical precepts, and encumbered by the provisions of the ceremonial law on the pages of Exodus, as now it is. It is principally owing to this confusion that the ministers of Christ’s Church Waver between breaking of bread as the apostles did, and offering sacrifice as Levi did, when they stand at the altar. If any are disposed to object that the Church, in exercising her authority by setting forth a Bible in which passages are removed from their present places to others, giving a rearranged text, might expose herself to the charge of disposing texts so as to favour and support any particular doctrine, a little reflection will show that there are no grounds for such apprehension ; for the Church, in interpreting, is bound by the Gospel and the Creed ; as in trans- lating, by the language and the grammar ; and in rearranging the order of passages, by the syntax and context. Articles of belief are not dependent on the context of passages, but every one of them is like the substance of one of the commandments, a distinct proposition, unaffected by the context, except so far as illustration or expansion is con- cerned. PATHS TO DWELL IN. 83 The rearranging of the text of the Old Testa- ment is advocated, not in the interests of contro- versies between Churches, but for the credit of the books in the eyes of those who look on them as literature, and therefore require in them the usual formal features of literary works. Their essential and distinctive qualities would not sutler by their being edited on the same principles of criticism as are applied to the editing of any ancient writings. Since improved knowledge of language is considered to justify their retrans- lation, it would seem reasonable to argue that the present equally advanced science of criticism justifies the re-editing of them, or rather a practical editing of their contents. 8 4 THE RESTORATION OF IV. 1. The book Exodus probably transposed by the ancient Jews. — 2. Their reasons for transposing its contents — Original order recoverable. — 3. Its desirableness. — 4. Confusing effect of its present arrangement. 1. If it is objected that the known aversion of the Jews from altering the shape even of a letter in the text must much more have deterred them from alter- ing the sequence of passages in it ; it may reasonably be answered that the Rabbinical scrupulousness with respect to the form of the letter is of comparatively recent date. Such servile worship of the text, which made them respect and honour even the palpable lapses of the pen of some former scribe, must have originated in days when the copyist, who transcribed the text, had to reproduce a language which he hardly understood, and a type not of common use. Such a copyist would rather be more accurate than PATHS TO DWELL IN. 85 one who, whilst copying, mentally criticised the work he was transcribing. We copy an inscription of which we know the language, without regard to the form of the letter : of an inscription in an un- known tongue we make, not a copy hut a fac- simile. So that the later imperfect knowledge of the Hebrew language among the Jews has actually favoured the exact reproduction of old rolls of Scripture. But, originally and anciently, the text of Scrip- ture was handled more rationally and profitably. In carrying out the directions given (Deut. vi. 9) about writing the ten commandments on the posts of the house, and on the town gates, the Jews appear often to have added portions of texts from various parts of Scripture. So, at least, they appear on the fragment of a limestone slab (now in the Leeds Museum), on which, after the commandments, of which the last four in their abbreviated form are still legible, there follow the words — Thou shalt build there an altar. (Deut. xxvii. 6.) Thou shalt write on stones all the words of this law (ver. 8) ; and another line in which the word Moses only is perfectly legible. These latter lines on the slab show that Scripture could be lawfully 86 THE RESTORATION OF transposed for grave and profitable purposes.* The terms of the statute quoted, thou shalt write all the words of this law , mean all the commandments, which were called the ten words, and are probably these — I. I am the Lord thy God that brought thee out of the land of Egypt. II. Thou shalt have none other gods before Me. III. Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain. IV. Eemember the Sabbath-day to keep it holy. V. Honour thy father and thy mother. VI. Thou shalt not kill. VII. Thou shalt not commit adultery. VIII. Thou shalt not steal. IX. Thou shalt not bear false witness. X. Thou shalt not covet. If the concise form in which they sometimes * The slab in question was found at Nablous of the Samaritans, near Mount Gerizim, where Joshua wrote upon the stones a copy of the law of Moses (Josh. viii. 32), words which must imply the ten commandments. The claims which Jewish written commentaries have to our consideration may be estimated by the comment on this place, which informs us that Joshua engraved on stones the whole five Books of Moses in seventy different languages. PATHS TO DWELL IN. 8 7 appear written is indeed all of tlie commandments, it follows that in the form* in which some of' them appear in Exodus we have the actual commandment, and also an expansion of it inserted as assigning a cause for the commandment, or as applying its general law to particular cases. This opinion accounts for the fact that in the copy of the fourth commandment, in Deuteronomy, a reason for the sanctification of the Sabbath is given different from that assigned in the copy of the same commandment in Exodus. When the Lord spoke the commandment, He could not have spoken it in both forms ; if He spoke it in either form, it could not possibly have been altered ; we cannot suppose the one form was on the first tables, the other on the second. The onlv conclusion seems to be, that the reasons assigned for the sanctification of the Sabbath were no part of what God spoke or wrote, but that the Lord said merely Remember the Sabbath-day to keep it holy ; and that what follows has been usefully inserted as an in- spired expansion and application of the command- ment. The same argument may reasonably be used with 88 THE RESTORATION OF reference to the detail of things not to be carved or graven for worship. That the matter, usually ranking as the second commandment, was not one of the ten precepts spoken by the Lord may he inferred from our finding that Moses, in exhorting the people to abstain from image worship, does not cite words from the Lord, heard by them, forbidding it, but argues against it from the fact that they had not seen any similitude on the day when the Lord spoke to them (Deut. iv. 15) ; and thence forbids their attempting to invent any likeness under which to worship the Lord. Images were not offensive in the Temple nor perilous to the faith, unless placed, a desolating abo- mination , at the place of prostration before the Lord ; hence, neither the cherubim over the mercy seat, nor the oxen supporting the great laver were ob- jectionable; no Jew could conceive of any one worshipping except at the one appointed place. Prayer was made everywhere by the devout with the face turned towards the veil ; but worship, prostration, before the sanctuary veil, was distinct from the act of prayer ; it was required to be performed three times a year in acknowledgment PATHS TO DWELL LN. 89 of the Lord ; it was the act of homage exacted of every Israelite. 2. As soon as we discover evidences that such a book as Exodus is lying before us in a disjointed state, events which followed made to precede, and effects stated before their causes appear, through a dislocation of the matters in the book ; we first desire to ascertain whether any sufficient reason can be assigned for the ancient copyists having so disarranged the normal order of the matter in it. We arrive at the reason by reflecting that Ezra could not have transcribed from the autograph of Moses. If the book of the law which Ililkiah found in the Temple, to his amazement, in the days of Josiah, was the autograph, we cannot reasonably suppose that it survived and was carried to Babylon and brought back. We know, however, that from early times — at least, in the days of the early kings — the judges who went their circuits carried a book of the law with them. These books must have been compiled from the Temple roll originally ; and the priests in the Temple required copies for their use in putting the law into practice, and in deciding cases. If we 90 THE RESTORATION OF carefully inspect Exodus in its present form, what first strikes us is, that the ten commandments are immediately followed by cases decided on points raised by each commandment. We see that the historical chronological order of events is interrupted, and cases on the law are inter- polated between the publishing of the command- ments orally by the Lord, and the delivery of them in writing on the tables of stones. This arrange- ment is the one which would naturally be selected and adopted by a judge for his own use in deciding questions relative to cases not provided for by the letter of the commandment, but to be decided in the spirit of it. And these sets of cases are headed by the words, the Lord said unto Moses , because they were cases brought before Moses, and by him laid before the Lord who knew Moses face to face , which means, admitted him to audience , and gave him in- structions, as a king instructs his officer of state. This hypothesis of a systematic digest of statutes in Exodus is confirmed by our perceiving that cases decided have been arranged with some re- gard to the order of the commandments, according as they supplemented the particular commandment. PATHS TO DWELL IN. 9 * For instance, the first precept being thou shall have no other gods before me, i.e. no idols at the place where I am worshipped, the first supplementary ordinance, inserted immediately after the complete series of the commandments, forbids the placing of silver and gold images at the place of worship ; the next describes the manner of altar to be made there (Exod. xx. 23, 24). The fourth commandment having mentioned men- servants and maidservants, there then follow cases determined respecting male and female servants. The sixth commandment is then explained as to what is to he considered murder. The fifth, direct- ing honour to parents, is next supplemented by the addition of the punishment to he inflicted on him who curseth father or mother. This arrangement is evidently so obviously adapted to the use of him who had to expound and exemplify the moral law, that it seems most reasonable to con- clude that the book would be arranged for use on some such principle. If so, then it has not been by chance that the book presents the original matter in a dislocated form. If the matter of the law is to be rearranged, it 92 THE RESTORATION OF must be done in accordance with the principle of re- moving subsequent supplementary statutes from in- termixture with the original primary commandments, an ancient disarrangement, also made on a principle, not by accident, but with the commendable object of making the law of ready access and reference to those who had to apply it. If the text has been so dealt with by the ancient Jewish Church, as in the preceding arguments it has been supposed to have done, it certainly can be no irreverence to the text, nor unprecedented liberty taken with it, if the Church of Christ should put back into its original form the matter of the Book of Exodus ; that, having served, in its present form, those who lived under the Levitical dispensation, it may return to that form in which it best serves those who live under the Gospel moral law, offering them true doctrine most directly. It would not suit the limits of the present essays to sketch out a rearrangement of the whole Book of Exodus ; what is now urged and contemplated will be sufficiently shown by bringing together into right sequence the narrative of the first ascent of Moses into Mount Sinai. PATHS TO DWELL IN. 93 According to Deuteronomy , v. 22 : The Lord , having spoken the ten commandments , added no more ; and the people being terrified and promising to obey the law , Moses reported their fear and promise to the Lord, who dismissed the people from attendance, but called Moses to him to be taught. Hence, after Exod. xx. 17, we next recover the narrative at Exod. xxiv. 1. And lie said unto Moses, come up unto the Lord, thou, and Nadab and Abihu, and seventy of the elders of Israel, and worship ye afar off. V er. 2 [said to the elders and others) : And Moses alone shall come near unto the Lord, but they shall not come nigh ; neither shall the people go up with him. Omitting what intervenes , we go forward to ver. 9. Then went up Moses, and Aaron, Nadab and Abihu, and seventy of the elders of Israel : and they saw the God of Israel : and there \ was under his feet as it were a paved work of a sapphire stone, and as it were the body of heaven in its clearness. And upon the nobles of the children of Israel he laid not his hand {i.e. did not smite them) : also they saw God, and did eat and drink {i.e. lived after having seen him). And the Lord said unto Moses, come up unto me in the mount, and be there: and I will give thee tables of stone, and a 94 THE RESTORATION OF law, and commandments which I have written ; that thou mayest teach them, fyc., to ver. 18, to the words, Moses was in the mount forty days and forty nights. Passing over interpolations, we go for- ward to Exod. xxxi. 18. And He gave unto Moses, when He had made an end of communing with him on Mount Sinai, two tables of testimony, tables of stone, written with the finger of God; c. xxxii. 1. And when the people saw that Moses delayed to come down out of the mount, the people gathered themselves together unto Aaron, and said to him, Make us gods, which shall go before us, &c. ; and the narrative proceeds , as in the printed Bibles, to the end of c. xxxii. The above is the orderly narrative of the circum- stances attending the audible publication of the ten commandments by the Lord, the first abode of Moses on the mount, the delivery of the law written by the finger of God on two tables of stone, and the breaking of those tables. All else that appears in Bibles, interpolated here and there into the narrative, belongs to events sub- sequent to the second abode of Moses on the mount, that is, to the Levitical law given on that occasion. PATHS TO DWELL IN. 95 It was during his second abode on the mount that the pattern of things ecclesiastical was shown to Moses. 3. When it is proposed to remove bodily from their present place such large portions of the Book of Exodus as the whole 21st, 22nd and 23rd chapters, it becomes necessary to find the place in which they can be inserted as consistently as they can be re- moved from their present place. As the context of the book and sequence of the narrative indicate their present misplacement, so they also indicate their proper original locality in the book. There is a distinct heading and preface (Exod. xxxiv. 29) to a narrative of all that had been taught and authorised on the occasion of the second abode of Moses on Mount Sinai ; and, if the order of the narrative and dispensations is of im- portance, to this place they should be removed as having been their original position. (Exod. xxxiv. 29). It came to pass, when Moses came down from Mount Sinai, &c. ; Aaron and all the rulers of the congregation returned unto him, &c. ; and afterwards all the children of Israel came nigh, &c. ; and Moses gathered all the congregation of the 96 THE RESTORATION OF children of Israel together, and said unto them, These are the ivords which the Lord hath commanded that ye should do then . At this place must have followed, in the original rolls, the statutes and ordinances commanded ; but in the present arrangement nothing follows but a particular precept about not kindling a fire on the Sabbath day. And from this place the several pre- cepts have been extracted, to be inserted as we find them, where each was of readiest reference for appli- cation in dealing with cases arising out of the general law of the commandments. Here, also, after this series of ordinances, must have followed the narrative of the sacrifice offered by young men of the children of Israel, commissioned by Moses, with the blood of which sacrifice the people and the book were sprinkled (Exod. xxiv. 4) ; and the calling of the tribe of Levi to the priesthood (Exod. xxviii. 1 ; Deut. x. 8). Thus, when the light of the Spirit of the Gospel is commanded to shine on the chaos to which the book has been reduced by the hands of Levi, it takes form and order of itself. The broad distinction between the original moral PATHS TO DWELL IN. 97 law and the dispensation combining the moral law with ceremonies, entirely unperceived by the Jewish people, hut clearly revealed by the Gospel light, may he apprehended by understanding that the Lord on Mount Sinai met his people as a father his children, Out of Egypt have I called my Son (IIos. xi. 1). Then God himself shone forth on them from Paran. Light and truth were offered them directly from the Lord. After the tables had been broken, and Moses had returned from his second abode on Mount Sinai, only the face of Noses shone on them, not the light of God’s countenance ; they then received light and instruction, urim and thummin , from the priest. They became not sons, but servants (Lev. xxv. 55). When Christ came, then again men saw the glory of God in the face (person) of Jesus Christ (2 Cor. iv. 6). The popular notion of the Almighty who spoke from Sinai, is simply the Manichaean view, as in the hymn — “ When God of old came down from heaven, In power and ivrath He came.” 4. The overlapping of two phases of divine H g8 THE RESTORATION OF dispensation is the impediment to a profitable under- standing of the hook Exodus in its present arrange- ment ; tainting the eternal moral law with the temporary Levitical ordinances, associating Mel- chisedek with Levi, and making the shadow part of the substance ; a rearrangement of the matter of the book is demanded as a duty to the people, and the Church alone has the spirit of wisdom enabling the doing of it by her. This confusion of the Levitical with the moral dispensation has given Levi a voice in ordering things in the Church of Christ, whereas Melchisedek is her pattern, and the spiritual sacrifice at the Christian altar ought to reflect the ante-Levitical Passover. The confusion has arisen from the want of a marked boundary-line separating the scope and extent of Moses’s first abode on the mount, and the instruc- tions which he then received, from the scope and extent of his second abode on the mount, and the narrative of the pattern of ceremonial things then shown to him. Whatever spiritual instructions Moses received on the occasion of his first abode on Mount Sinai, no direct and formal publication of them was ever made PATHS TO DWELL IN. 99 by him ; when he broke the tables, the very germ of the law of holiness was checked in its growth, and never grew so as to overshadow the people with the wings of the Almighty. They lived under the shadow of death, that is, of the Levitical ordinances, which could never give life . It was not until He who spoke to Moses on Mount Sinai, stood on the Mount of Beatitudes and spoke the sermon on the mount, that men heard orderly and distinctly the actual meaning of the ten com- mandments, and the manner in which the spirit of them was to be kept. For the Mount of the Sermon is the Sinai of the Church of Christ. Our Lord re- hearsed the commandments in the letter, Ye have heard that it teas said by them of old time , Thou shall not kill ; and gave the meaning, the spirit, but I say unto you. That whosoever is angry with his brother without a cause shall be in danger of the judgment (Mat. v.). Our Lord did not come to fulfil the Levitical, but the eternal law ; He, as it were, took up and restored the tables that fell from the hands of Moses and were broken, and resumed the dispensation of grace at the point where it had been suspended on the idolatry of I 00 THE RESTORATION OF the Israelites before the golden calf. He carried the thoughts of men back beyond Levi’s days to the faith in which Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob lived. As man, He died by the hands of Levi, a martyr to the truth of the eternal moral law, protesting against the reality of the ceremonial law. The sacrifice of his death is distinctly pointed out as a sacrifice of a type more ancient than Levi ; his death being likened to the sacrifice of the Passover lamb in Egypt by the cir- cumstances noted that they brake not his bones. Nor did the ministrations of Levi supply one feature to the Christian Passover which he instituted, He, Himself, being the lamb slain, not from the day of Levi’s consecration only, but, figuratively, in every lawful sacrifice from the days of Adam. The learned men who are now labouring to im- prove the authorised English version of the Bible, are dealing with a version which has influenced mankind more widely than the Vulgate, and which has had no rival in power and effect on men, except it be the Greek Alexandrian version by the Seventy. If the Church of England will charge them to re- edit the Old Testament, by restoring, as far as possible, every passage to that place which it re- PATHS TO DWELL IN. IOI quires, in order that the sequence of matter may be also the sequence of doctrine, though they might not in some places succeed in replacing the text in the form in which it left the author’s hand, yet they could not fail to produce a Bible such that it would surpass in excellence of workmanship the rehabili- tated rolls of Ezra. And, by their labours, the Church would at last, and for the first time, read the Scriptures without haying her mouth bridled by the bridle of the J ews ; and would no longer measure out the Scriptures to her people with the homer and bin of Levi. 102 THE RESTORATION OF v. 1. Proposed revision of the authorised version. — 2. Jewish inter- pretations not to he implicitly trusted. — 3. Jewish miscon- ceptions as to the visitation of a father’s iniquity on his children. — 4. Decadence and revivai of the knowledge of Hebrew. 1. The sound mind of the primitive Church considered that the Scriptures were intended for divulgation amongst all believers in the language which every communion spoke. Hence, the Syriac Church secured to her people, in the apostolic age, or soon after, the Scriptures in the Syriac language of the Peshito version. The Chaldee Targums led the way. The Latin version must have appeared in the second century, and, as being understood by the people, soon supplanted the Greek version in Italy ; St. Paul’s Epistle to the Church at Pome in the Greek language, among other causes, having made the Greek the canonical language at first of the PATHS TO DWELL LN. 103 Churcli at Rome. In the fourth century, Ulphilas, by his Mooso-Gothic version, sanctified a barbarous tongue by translating into it those Scriptures which a Christian Rabbinism suggested were to be written only in one or other of those three languages in which our Lord’s offence was inscribed on the cross by Pilate. The historian, Socrates, taunts Ulphilas for having translated the Scriptures into the lan- guage of chapmen, ^aOvpo'KwXai ; but it is his glory. The Church of England, above all other Churches, has made it part of her vocation to translate the Scriptures, not only into her own language, but into that of every nation to which her people have access ; and in so doing has vindicated and exem- plified her true catholicity. The suggestion emanating from the Episcopal Church in America, that no alteration should be made in the authorised English version of the Holy Scriptures, without consultation with all parties con- cerned, that is to say, with all of the Anglican race in any part of the world who are in communion with the See of Canterbury, justifies the opinion, held already by some, that the consent of the Church of England to a revision of her authorised text of io4 THE RESTORATION OF the Scriptures was of far wider import than it may have seemed to be to others. Taken in connection with other significant indica- tions in Christianity at large, it appears every day more and more to he a symptom of an approaching movement among Christians as important as was the Reformation. If such a movement is approaching, no temporising will avert it ; and, if it is to be prepared for and guided, moulded and sobered, it must be by the active exertions of the Church of England, which is the heart to the pulses which beat in the Anglican communion in the ends of the earth. The Church in England prospered better in her reformation of herself than the Christians in Ger- many and Switzerland did in reforming their tenets ; because, in England, the reformatory process was worked by the Church, but, abroad, by the people. This is an instructive fact, as teaching the Church in England to lead the way, and direct the progress of any movement which may be impending. It is useful also to remember that it was by the labours of Erasmus, in purifying the current version of the New Testament, that the Reformation was PATHS TO DWELL LN. 105 furnished with a better exposition of the mind of Evangelists and Apostles, as a justification of its fundamental assertion, that the shackles, which had V been riveted on the souls and minds of men, were not that yoke of Christ which brings unbridled nature into subjection to the Spirit, as the Church of Home asserted them to be, but fetters which im- peded the growth of healthy religion and of the reasonable intellect. Until then, mental and spiritual bondage had been justified out of the New Testament, not by alter- ing the original so as to make it serve the purpose, but by the sleight of hand of the interpreter, who superinduced over the original a meaning which it never intended to give ; transmuting, for instance, Heravoia into penance. The distinction between \ penance and repentance had been well pointed out by Maimonides, on the repentance of the Ninevites (Jonah iii. 10). “ It is not said, God saw their sack- cloth and fasting, but, God saw their works.” What was then done as to the New Testament, in the way of vindicating its original from interested translators, was not then done, nor ever has since been done, as to the Old Testament, so as to vindi- I 106 THE RESTORATION OF cate its original from prejudiced Jewish trans- lators. Consequently, it is still exhibited in that fashion and with that meaning which the Jews chose to discern in it, because it was one which gratified their conceits. For, though the compilers of the English version confronted, as St. Jerome did, the Septuagint with the Hebrew, they yet embodied, without modification, into their version, the views and opinions of the Septuagint on all the legislation and transactions recorded in the Old Testament. And, since the views of the Septuagint are the views taken by the Jews three hundred years before Christ, the Church still borrows the key of the Rabbi for admission into the mysteries of the law, not the key of David (Rev. iii. 7 ), except in those cases where Christ or his Apostles have opened for her. The fetters which galled men’s minds before the Reformation, gall them no more ; but many will no longer submit to be bound by an imposed inters pretation of the Old Testament which represents the Lord as commanding in its days what He forbade in the days of the Gospel. Men rise half inspired PATHS TO DWELL IN. 107 from the perusal of the Gospel, and cannot identify the Lord who wept at the very thought of the destruction of Jerusalem, with the Lord who, as the Jews represent it, ordered that nothing which breathed should be left alive, but all slaughtered in that town, among others, in a former age. ■s This is not the fruit of rationalising ; it is the true effect of that faith which holds that the Lord God, the Redeemer under the Gospel Covenant, is the same Lord God spoken of in the Old Testament, who said of Himself, I change not , “ Conditor utriusque Testamenti.” It is not the theologian, nor the rationalist, but it is a reasonable faith, which in- sists on seeing in the Gospel a resurrection of the Old Testament, which, having fallen asleep in Malachi with the words of hope on its Kps, and having lain buried without seeing corruption, rises again vivified and spiritualised in the new dispensa- tion, which is to the old, as Christ’s body at his resurrection was to the body which He had before. Therefore the task that lies before the Church of England is no mere modernising of obsolete words, nor mere polishing of the surface, but it is no less than to set forth the Old Testament in such wise, io8 THE RESTORATION OF that it shall not he rebuked by the Gospel, and to supply the English-voiced intellect in the whole world with a homogeneous Bible. Society gives many indications that a move forward is in progress, analogous to that of the sixteenth century, among thoughtful men, towards an appre- hension of the Old Testament more consistent with the temper of the Gospel than that which has long been admitted. The Hebrew language is now as well understood, and by as many, as the Greek language was in the sixteenth century. The translators of our Bible, and the editors of 4 Walton’s Polyglott/ knew Hebrew perfectly, as it is taught in the Septuagint ; and in Lightfoot and the elder Buxtorf the Babbi of the days of St. Jerome was reproduced. This is not the place in which to explain how the Hebrew and its cognate dialects have come to be ex- plored without dependence on the crutches of the Septuagint and of the Babbi. As Hebrew is studied solely for the sake of the Old Testament, every step gained in the knowledge of the language is a step in advance into the true meaning of those Scriptures. PATHS TO DWELL LN. 109 Had the Church kept her current version of the New Testament up to the level of the still ad- vancing knowledge of Greek among the learned, the Church would have benefited in influence, as much as she did in doctrine, from the step gained at the Reformation, and would have escaped the evil of the divisions consequent on it. It was through Wy elide’ s and Tyndale’s versions, and Cranmer’s published Bible that the Church of England was enabled to speak peace to the people at her Reformation, and to preserve her Apostolical dignity from a scathing similar to that which has withered the Church in Germany. The Church of England has now at her command authority and learning qualifying her to interpose, by the exhibition of a revised and re-edited Bible, between those who, at a great disadvantage, are main- taining the truth out of an inadequate translation and a fatally confused text of the Old Testament, against some who charge on the original the contra- dictions of translators ; and against others who over- look the fact that the Scriptures were not sent among men to explain themselves, but with the promise of an accompanying Spirit alone able to explain them. I 10 THE RESTORATION OF It is undoubtedly true tbat there is no article of belief remaining to be discovered in the Scripture ; all such were pointed out by the Spirit to the Apostles ; but there is much to justify and vindicate the faith still lying in the Old Testament obscured by interpretations given by men who lived before Christ. It is in this direction that more light from the Old Testament may be expected, or rather light more appreciable by those who depend on their own mother tongue alone to give them the true meaning ; though, even in their case, the real spirit of the holy text often overpowers and shines through a weak translation as the sun shines through a flame ; and secular knowledge often helps translation to a fit sense, as, when reading that God hates , it is under- stood as when we read the sun rises ; notwithstanding the language, the mind, in the one case, does not impute passion to the Lord, as, in the other case, it does not assert motion in the sun. 2. The Church, when translating and interpreting the Old Testament, must ever bear in mind that hitherto the Church in translating has been guided by a version, the Septuagint, made by Jews, and that our Lord warned his Church that the Jews had PATHS TO DWELL IN. 1 1 1 misunderstood the doctrine of their own Scriptures, and that therefore a Jewish view of the doctrine in them cannot be accepted without great caution by the Church of Christ. It was not concerning the prophecies relating to Himself that our Lord expressed astonishment at the ignorance of Scripture truth exhibited by a master in Israel, or declared that their learned men erred, not knowing the Scriptures ; but our Lord re- proved them for a misunderstanding of Scripture, amounting to a perversion of it, with respect to the moral meaning of the law of God, to the intention of his commandments, and generally to the power of God. Such misapprehensions and perversions would be manifested, if anywhere, in a translation of the original Scriptures made by J ews, such as the Septuagint. In transfusing the original its essence would escape through the incapacity of those who handled it. The translator could do no more than give what he considered the meaning of his original, but if he misapprehended the Spirit of it, his version must be carnal. If it is thought that St. Jerome, a Christian Father, in composing his Latin version I I 2 THE RESTORATION OF would restore to the Scripture the Spirit which they lost when being translated by Greek-speaking Jews, it must be remembered that St. Jerome trusted, as translators, Jews who denied Christ, and therefore were further from the Spirit than their ancestors, the Greek Septuagint translators. It is not suggested that the interpretations of words supplied by the Jews to St. Jerome were ever intentionally given incorrectly ; but this is certain, that the Jews taught the Old Testament to the Church. St. Jerome states that Origen himself, and Clement (of Alexandria), Eusebius and others, when, reasoning on any text, they wished to adduce proofs, were 1 accustomed to write, a Hebrew told me so, or, I learnt it of a Hebrew, or, such is the opinion of the Hebrews. The Church, in fact, having no knowledge of the Hebrew tongue, was like the Israelites in Saul’s days when they had no smiths in Israel, and she had to go down to the Jews to furbish argu- ments on the Old Testament for her, as the Israelites had to go down to the Philistines to sharpen every man his tools. It would be an easy matter to deal with Jewish misunderstandings of Scripture, if they dated only PATHS TO DWELL IN. 113 from the days after Ezra ; but the old prophets are as explicit and emphatic as our Lord in declaring that the ancient J ews in and before their days acted on a misconception of the meaning of the Lord ex- pressed in the Scriptures. And from the first giving of the law, the Spirit testifies of the Israelites, they have not known my ways. Hence, not only that which Jewish interpreters have written, hut that which the Israelites at all periods of their history con- sidered to he the will of God, and as such acted on, % may he lawfully suspected to he a misconception of his will and commandments. And therefore his intentions cannot safely he deduced from anything the Israelites did, thinking they did God service; all must be sifted by the law and the testimony before we can tell what is the wheat and what the chaff. But this indispensable preparatory process has never been performed by any who have translated Scripture. Wherever they read the Lord said , they unhesitatingly asserted that the Lord had said it ; they did not pause to inquire whether the Jews interpreted the text to mean that the Lord had spoken to the purport stated, or whether the Lord 1 1 1 4 THE RESTORATION OF had actually so commanded them. However, in speaking of the misconceptions entertained by the Israelites of the Lord’s providential processes in governing the world, we must premise that they always retained many most true and distinct notions of the Almighty, such, in fact, as broadly distin- guished them from nations who had no revelation. They attributed all government to one God ; they knew sin to be the cause of all misery ; they believed that with God there was forgiveness. # Lord Bacon’s dictum, that it were better to have no such opinion of God at all, than such an opinion as is unworthy of Him, is not applicable to the Israelites at any time of their existence as a nation. Yet, our Lord’s words to the Jews, Ye say that He is your God ; ye have neither heard his voice at any time, nor seen his shape (John v. 37), justify us in believing that even on occasions when God spoke to them, or manifested Himself to them, when He gave the commandments and suffered Moses to see his goodness (Exod. xxxiii. 19), they misunderstood Him, and misconceived his nature ; for the shape of God, eihos Oeou , must mean his will and nature, for they saw no similitude. They erred, therefore, in PATHS TO DWELL IN. 115 their conception of the Lord the King, as well as in that of the Lord the Messiah ; and, as the Church cannot accept their views concerning the dispensa- tion of grace, so neither can the Church accept their views of the dispensation of the law, it remains to be cleared of the untempered mortar with which Jewish passions and self-interest daubed it. Our Lord is the only Jew whose opinion on the matter of the Old Testament can be accepted by the Church. From this general assertion of the misconcep- tions of the Israelites with regard to the Lord, not only all inspired men must be excepted, but also multitudes whom the Lord knew as his. It applies to those who are always most pro- minent in history, the leaders of opinion, the guides acceptable to the multitude. The opinions of such \ men and the doings of their followers occupy a large space in the Old Testament, as the doings of the Pharisees and Sadducees and of their creatures do in the New Testament, and, in process of time, a notion of the Lord seems to have prevailed almost universally among the Jews derogatory to his true nature, and erroneous regarding his inten- tions towards men, and by this opinion they 1 16 THE RESTORATION OF interpreted Scripture. For, as things seen by coloured light appear to have themselves the same colour as the light cast on them, so will Scripture appear to have the very same temper as that of the man who views it. That only is the true light which shows things in their proper colours, and that only is the true temper which reads Scripture in the spirit which dictated it. 3. An apt illustration of an ancient J ewish miscon- ception of Scripture, affecting both their conception of the nature and attributes of the Almighty, and also of his moral government of mankind, is to he found in the view which they took of the text that speaks of the Lord’s visiting the iniquity of fathers upon the children. The infirmity of the ancient Jews in infusing a human temper into a divine precept, and the easy acquiescence of Christian minds in adopting the Jewish view, may he illustrated by inspecting the text, where we read that the Lord visits the iniquity of the fathers upon the children to the third and fourth generation of them that hate him. Early English Bibles said, visiting the sins of the fathers upon the children, as the text still reads in PATHS TO DWELL LN. 117 the Communion Service. King James’s translators wrote, the iniquity of the fathers. We approach the consideration of the text by ob- serving that it is part of a supplement appended to the commandment which forbids, not sins against our neighbour, but, multiplying objects of worship, either by acknowledging more gods than one, or by worshipping images. Consequently, the original Hebrew does not speak of chatah , sin of man against man, but of avon, sin against the Lord in the form of idolatry. The word avon , including the sense of vanity , idols being vain things (1 Sam. xii. 21), is restricted in Scripture to the sin of idolatry, and of adultery the synonym of idolatry (Numb. v. 14), and means an idol Is. lxvi. 3. Those guilty of the iniquity denounced are said to be those who hate God ; and as Maimonides rightly observes, none are said to hate God except those who worship idols. Opposed to these in the precept, are those who love God ; which is applied only to those who abide in the true faith. They who practise his commandments, are said to know God (Jer. xxii. 16). In passages which treat of religion, the fathers are the teachers , the children or sons their disciples or 1 1 8 THE RESTORATION OF followers , who in all ages have taken the name of their teacher to designate their schism, and have disobeyed our Lord’s injunction, Call no man your % father upon earth. This inspection of the original Hebrew, made without any disturbing bias, shows that the Lord forbade the acknowledging of any One but Himself as God, and the worshipping of images ; and then declared the duration of his forbearance with per- yerters of religion to be limited to the fourth genera- tion of men who continued so long to hold the heresies and idolatries taught by the original author of the heresy, the spiritual father of whom they have been the children. To four generations , is the space given to communities to repent in, and amend in ; after which the Lord’s corrective and punitive forbearance is superseded by his judgments. It notes a period, in opposition (in this place) to the fact stated that there is no definite period assigned to the operation of God’s mercy in the case of a suc- cession of men loving Him by keeping his com- mandments. The commandment therefore has no reference to the crimes of an ancestor as involving his descendants in punishment. It could not con- PATHS TO DWELL LN. 1 19 sistently refer to crimes, because it is in the first table, which deals with man’s conduct towards God, his profession of religion. A father’s excesses entail disease on his offspring in the economy of nature ; a father’s forgery is a reproach on his children in the economy of society. Crime is personal, and not hereditary. Original sin is a reality, but original crime is an imaginary thing. The universal error of the J ews on the point may be detected in the question which the disciples put to our Lord concerning the man who had been born blind : Who did sin , this man or his parents, that he teas bom blind ? and the words of the Pharisees, Thou west altogether born in sin, show that they held punishment to be original, in the sense in which we apply the word in the term original sin. But it \ required an inspired prophet to controvert the inveterate opinion of the J ews that descendants were tormented, even if guiltless, for crimes committed by an ancestor who may have suffered no punishment for tiem. For such is the import of the proverb, which passed among them for theology, The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge (set an edge, correctly) (Ezek. xviii.). They I 20 THE RESTORATION OF did not consider that it was but mockery on the part of the Psalmist to say, Be not like your forefathers a stubborn generation , if they had to suffer for the stubbornness of their ancestors, whether they were docile or not. The Jews saw that some wicked men enjoyed great immunity from misfortune ; they themselves were in extreme misfortune. They imagined that the Lord, who had overlooked the sins of their prosperous ancestors, was at length punishing those sins in them, their innocent posterity. Hence the proverb which they framed on their corrupt understanding * 1 of Scripture. There is also a natural vindictiveness ii man which inclines him to injure the children of a man who may have offended him ; and the besetting error of the Jewish conception of the Lord was, that they thought Him such a one as themselves were. They saw a human, not the divine temper in the precepts of Scripture. The commandment forbidding children to be punished for their father’s sins, is of itself sufficient to preserve us from supposing that the Lord punishes a child because the child’s father sinned ; for though PATHS TO DWELL IN. 121 tlie Jews had not the same light as we have, we know that the Lord commands nothing hut what He Himself practises. The object of his command- ments and of his grace being, to make man treat his neighbour as the Lord treats him. And if He commanded men to refrain from punishing children for their father’s fault, it is because He refrains from doing it. The ancient Jewish misconception of the text has prevailed, and has been accepted by Christian writers. When, however, the text comes to he looked into, it cries out to the Spirit which is in the Gospel to de- liver the word of God which is in it from its per- version by them of old time. And, by the instance of its own case, warns the Church to beware of receiving either the ancient or the more recent views of the Jews concerning the morality of the Old Testament and their interpretation of the record of the motives and government of the Lord, and to look for herself, she having the light . 4. W r e have depended greatly for the meaning of words spoken by the Lord on a Greek transla- tion and on a Chaldee translation, both made after the return of the Jews from Babylon. Invaluable 122 THE RESTORATION OF helps as they are, they are not adequate interpreters for the Church of Christ. As the learned Bochart has remarked, Babylon was, to the tongue of the Hebrew speaking race, what its predecessor Babel had been to the post- diluvian race. The language of the Jews was con- founded at Babylon. They reckoned many things lost by them there ; hut among them they did not assign importance to the language of Moses and the prophets, which also they lost there. What they have since recovered of it has been taught them by other than Hebrew lips. No one would be satisfied now with the meaning of a Hebrew word given by the Rabbin in the fifth century, as St. Jerome was. He himself rejected the meaning which they offered him wherever the Church had given another ; and, by so doing, he shows how the Church must judge everywhere in Scripture by the Spirit of Christ. The days are past in which the linguist trusted to the Septuagint as his only Hebrew vocabulary ; yet, it is apparent that the Rabbin, in St. Jerome’s days, owed their knowledge of Hebrew, indirectly and unconsciously perhaps, but still undoubtedly and actually, to the PATHS TO DWELL LN. 123 Greek version, however strongly they may have deprecated the suspicion ; for they could not explain a word such as Shiloh, in interpreting which the Greek and the Chaldee expounders seemed to differ ; nor the word Selah , which both had left unexplained ; nor could they assign the proper vowel sounds to the name Jehovah , which the Greek translators had not transferred to their pages. There are even in the Rabbinical writings some confessions that this and that Rabbi learnt the meaning of a Hebrew word from hearing the same word used by the Arab. It may be that the Almighty took away the knowledge of the language of Moses from the people that had perverted its scriptural meaning by assigning carnal significations to spiritual utter- ances, at the Captivity, and hid it through the ages till it should be again acquired by the Church, when the Church had had time* to grow strong in the Spirit. It was not till the sixteenth century that an attempt was made to judge of the meaning of the Hebrew Scriptures without calling in the Jew, who, till then (for the Seventy of Alexandria were Jews), had dictated, and still to a great extent is allowed J 24 THE RESTORATION OF to dictate, to the Church how she is to understand them. It was in Southern Spain that Isaac and Ishmael, who had parted at Abraham’s tent at Mamre three thousand years before, met again ; the descendants of either had greatly varied the tongue which both spoke in Abraham’s tent. The Jew had lost his, and reckoned the Arabic to he the tongue which his fathers had lost ; so that, at first, works by Jews such as Maimonides were written in the Arabic language with a Chaldee type of letter, and ac- cepted as Hebrew by the Jews for some time. It was through an Arabic translation of the Greek Alexan- drian Scriptures that the Jews in Spain grew to know the meaning of the Hebrew Scriptures. It was there and thus that those scholars were formed who elaborated the Complutensian Polyglot under the auspices of Cardinal Ximenes, on the pages of which the various versions of the Scriptures were again set face to face with the original Hebrew for the first time since Origen had compiled his “ Hexapla.” PATHS TO DWELL IN. 125 YI. TRANSLATION AND INTERPRETATION, 1. Some causes of imperfections in the English authorised version, — 2. When interpretation struggles with translation the context is the umpire. — 3. National prejudices have swayed interpretation. — 4. Corrupt theology has darkened it. — 5. The two streams of prophecy in Isaiah. 1. When St. Jerome was engaged on a revision of tire old African and Italic-Latin versions, St, Augustine’s wisli was that the proposed Vulgate should be made closer to the Greek Alexandrian V version than the old Latin was; St. Jerome pro- posed to make it nearer in meaning to the original Hebrew. It seems, indeed, to have been a matter of doubt among some men in that day whether it would not be more orthodox to subordinate the Hebrew text to the Greek translation, than to tacitly disparage the renowned Septuagint (< quorum est gra - vissima audoritas , says St. Augustine) by treating 126 THE RESTORATION OF it as not equivalent in value to tlie original Hebrew. When St. Augustine describes the Jews as merely librarians to the Church, tanquam capsarii nostri sunt , nobis studentibus libros portant, he understates their office ; for he overlooks the fact that they handed to the Church, not simply their books for the Church to interpret to her people, but their own Jewish interpretation of them, the Septuagint, which the Church accepted without enquiry as to its iden- tity of meaning with the Hebrew books. The authorised English version has imprinted itself on the world more widely than the Septuagint did; and whatever English version may seek to supersede it, it will keep its place, as the Septuagint has. It has been incorporated into the whole mass of theology written in the English tongue since the days of its appearance. It has always been carefully quoted verbatim, and as long as Waterland, War- burton, and Butler occupy places on the book-shelf of the student, that English version also must have a place beside them. The conviction, that it never can be so superseded as to become obsolete, recon- ciles old students of it to the attempt at revising it, which is now in progress. PATHS TO DWELL IN. 127 When it first appeared, it carried forward the interpretation of the letter, by a vast step, nearer than ever before, to the mind of the Spirit ; but its diction being Anglo-Latin, there must be classes of words in it which ought now to be modified ; the diction of the people having since been modified. Its compilers w T ere men who were accustomed to think and to write in Latin, and who knew the Scriptures in the Yulgate Latin.* We detect their subserviency to the Yulgate, as the Church tongue, by their practice of simply adding a Saxon affix or expletive to the root of the Latin word used by the Yulgate, and putting the word so modified into their text, with very little regard for the Hebrew word before them. Where, for instance, the Hebrew has nissah , to test or try , if the Yulgate * It ought to have been made a rule by the authors both of the English Bible and English Prayer Book to adhere to one con- sistent vernacular type of words throughout. The observance of such a rule would have obviated obscurities. But instead of doing so, they imported words of scholastic Latin use to serve for the use of the unlearned reader. An instance occurs in the Nicene Creed, where the important word bgoovaiog is translated, scholas- tically, of one substance, whereas it is, in English, of one being : hence the Creed, if taught in those terms, cannot (in that place) he taught in the vulgar tongue as directed. 128 THE RESTORATION OF had tentavit they wrote tempted ; if the Vulgate had probavit they wrote proved . The English translators in their preface justify themselves for not everywhere translating the same Hebrew word by the same English word ; hut they cannot be justified for following the guidance of the Vulgate in using one and the same English word to translate six or seven different Hebrew words, especially when the Hebrew uses those words, not indiscriminately, but with a special discrimination required by the matter treated of. By having done so they have overlooked and prac- tically suppressed the fact, so consistently marked in the Hebrew, that though we may say that wicked men such as Goliath or Shimei curse, we must not, according to the Hebrew, say that God or good men ever curse . Overlooking this distinction, scrupu- lously observed in the Hebrew, our translators make God say, I will curse them that curse thee. This translation ignores and obliterates a punctiliousness and delicacy in the Hebrew which confirms St. Peter’s doctrine, that though the Lord is reviled He revileth not. For the Hebrew writes that God degrades or impoverishes, arar, the wicked, not that PATHS TO DWELL IN. 129 He curses or reviles , qalal , them. So that the Hebrew requires us to read, I will degrade them that revile thee , the Lord being the speaker.* In sentences such as cursed is the ground, cursed be Canaan, and without a single exception, wherever the Lord or good men are the speakers, the word is arar, impoverish . Where violent men speak, it is qalal, revile. Of these two words the former cannot be translated curse, though the latter reasonably may : the former is prophetic, or at most minatory, the latter malevolent. This serious defect in the English version nullifies St. James’s saying that blessing and cursing do not proceed out of the same mouth, for it represents the Lord as cursing as well as blessing. The compilers of the authorised version were restricted to the translation of the text, or to the making of a better version out of several pre- ceding good ones. Hence they did not concern themselves to reconcile inconsistencies, such as the * This meaning of arar is particularly observable where J oshua degrades the Gibeonites and sentences them to be hewers of wood and drawers of water, the lowest of menial offices. The English version says they were declared to be cursed (Josh. ix. 23). K 1 3 ° THE RESTORATION OF above, by any substantial divergence from received versions. Those, also, who look into the Bible with an eye that takes in at once more than a solitary word or idiom, are perplexed to understand bow they could write that the Lord intended to drive the seven nations out of Canaan himself, by the instrumentality of panic and noisome insects, and simultaneously to write that He intended the Israelites to slaughter them and expel them with the instrumentality of the sword. If the projected revision proposes to remove such ambiguities, the task before the revisers is more arduous and glorious than that which fell to the lot of Ezra when he rehabilitated the Scripture rolls after the captivity. But if the revisers simply correct the diction of the present English Old Tes- tament by obvious literal amendments, such as accumulate on the adversaria or in the commonplace books of students of Scripture, their work will not lift the reader out of the mists of former translations upwards into the body of heaven in its clearness, but will be only a prelude to an inevitable and more effectual treatment of the Hebrew text. PATHS TO DWELL IN. i3i 2. In attempting a translation of the Bible, it is not possible to avoid oscillating between making a version and giving an interpretation : these are not synonymous ; in the worker’s mind the interpretation must precede the translation. The foolish words of Job’s wife, Curse God and die , are an interpretation, not a translation, of the original ; it is an instance where the force of the context overpowers the habitual meaning of a word. The essential truths, indeed, of the Old Testament Scriptures are in many instances ascertained by weighing the interpretation of the text against a translation. A translation has only the weight given it by similar uses of the word ; but an inter- pretation has in addition a momentum imparted by \ the context. In the prophecy of the birth of Immanuel (Is. vii. 14) we have an instance of the necessity of allowing the context and the requirements of the subject to restrict a word of several meanings to one only meaning ; allowing in fact the context to dic- tate to the translator. That prophecy may unquestionably be trans- lated, Behold the girl shall conceive and bear a son ; no 132 THE RESTORATION OF philologist can possibly object to such a construing; the Jews, since the days of Christ, maintain that it is the correct translation. But the interpretation does not suffer it ; the context compels us to under- stand something to be foretold which was beyond man’s notion of what was possible, and this com- pulsory force of the context can be satisfied only by translating, Behold a virgin shall conceive and hear a son, that is to say, a virgin shall hear a son. The Jews translated it so until national prejudice threw them back on another meaning for the word almah ; and by so doing they furnish an illustration of super- inducing on Scripture, without altering the text, a meaning which perverts the intention of the Spirit by nullifying the context. We are justified in suspecting that this biassing habit of seeing an expedient meaning, instead of the intended meaning, in Scripture, has prevailed widely ever since the Scriptures were promulgated. 3. As the modern J ews have been biassed to trans- late almah, girl (Is. vii. 14), so the ancient Jews were biassed to translate charam , slaughter, instead of in- terdict (or excommunication), (Deut. vii. 2) ; where the Lord directs the Israelites how to deal with the PATHS TO DWELL IN. 1 33 nations of Canaan whilst He was gradually driving them out. At this place, also, the context supplies the interpretation, for it details the particulars of excommunication, not of slaughter ; and the word charam means interdict much more positively than does almah mean virgin : it is the intrinsic meaning of the word, and still is so, in the East. There is in fact, from the context and from the language, as much authority for translating charam , interdict , as for translating almali , virgin, in the prophecy con- cerning Immanuel, or bar ah, curse, in the words of Job’s wife. Unquestionably the word cliaram came in time to be used to imply destruction ; it acquired this mean- ing from cases where things were devoted to destruc- \ tion ; to or with the edge of the sword, being either inserted after the word charam , as 1 Sam. xv. 9, or left to be understood, from the context. But as, from the context and concomitant expressed inten- tions, we must understand Cicero to have desired the expulsion of Cataline when he said, Catalinam exter- minari volebam, though exterminari afterwards came to be used to imply destruction; similarly we are compelled to understand Moses to have intended the THE RESTORATION OF *34 excommunication of the nations of Canaan by the word charam. The cruel treatment of the dispossessed nations by the twelve tribes would not he a startling passage in the Old Testament if the sanction of the Almighty had not been claimed for it. The whole subject will be fully treated subsequently ; at this place it will be sufficient to suggest that a colouring has been given by translators to the original narrative, and to adduce some reasons showing the likelihood of its having been so coloured, and of the facts having been over- looked. The former will appear from appreciating a national bias in the Jewish nation, common to all other nations. It is not improbable that the effect of a national bias on the interpretation of the historical portions of the Old Testament has been overlooked by us, since we know that the attention and acumen of the Church have been exclusively concentrated on those passages of the Old Testament which support the foundations of her creed ; and all other passages, and, among them, those which exemplify the methods of God’s moral government of nations, have been only cursorily translated, and have PATHS TO DWELL IN. *35 been left to be discussed and formulated by ex- positors. It can hardly be doubted that, if actual articles of belief were involved in such passages as those which prescribe the dealings of the twelve tribes with the proscribed nations of Canaan, a w T ord such as cliaram (among others), which the Jews expounded as mean- ing daughter , to suit their own tempers, would have been recalled, the Church being the interpreter, to the meaning suitable to the context. Not only would the Jews naturally acquiesce in a version which claimed the sanction of the Lord for the military excesses of their ancestors, but also the studious among them would be the less likely to dispute that view of the case, because they devoted their interpretative abilities almost exclusively to the exposition of the ceremonial precepts, which held in the Jewish. Church the first place, as articles of belief do in the Christian Church. It was only the inspired in Israel who looked on Scripture as an exposition of the moral government of all nations by the Lord ; hence the difficulty of recognising and identifying, in accepted expositions and versions of the Old Testament, that method of 136 THE RESTORATION OF moral government attributed to the Almighty by Christ in the Gospel, and which must he enunciated in the actual Old Testament Scripture, and is to be found in them, though, it may he now, and has been for a long time hitherto, overlaid by a thick crust of human translations. The national prejudice or bias which partially blinded the Jews, as it does all nations, in estimating the deeds of ancestors, was, the notion of a distinctive eminence of the founders of their commonwealth in warlike exploits and military supremacy above all other races. They accordingly took a facile view of the historical portions of the Scriptures, such a view as encouraged this opinion. The delusion con- cerning military pre-eminence was coeval with the first rise of their nation, and is detected in its most glaring aspect in the inflated record of David’s mighty men of valour, inserted in the first book of Chronicles, secular not ecclesiastical records, from which it has been copied, and has been appended to the canonical Second Book of Samuel, there coming most incongruously after David’s last meek words of faith. It being in the eyes of the Jews the especial glory of David to have been the leader of such cap- PATHS TO DWELL IN. 1 37 tains ; and J oshua in their eyes was what Coeur de Lion is to the average reader of English history ; and David’s triumphs over the Philistines to them as Edward the Third’s victories over the French to us. This fond conceit of national military pre-emi- nence, as the great feature of their history, has tainted the Jewish understanding of its records from their beginning. When David was established in the kingdom, he had an opportunity of sanctifying the nation to peace; but as Saul aimed at a standing army in Israel, so he yielded to the temptation of looking on the multiplied people as so many more additional instruments prepared for war, and took pride in numbering them. This, the true view of \ the case, makes us cease wondering at the severity of the plague which was sent to quench this military spirit. (2 Sam. xxiv.) It was owing to these delusions that the Lord of Hosts is to them the God of armies ; though tsebah , a host, when applied to an army, is only so applied as it is to the stars, because of the number of indi- vidual objects ; and is even applied to a congregation of women at the tabernacle door. (1 Sam. ii. 22.) 138 THE RESTORATION OF The selection of the meaning armies, to describe the position of the people with regard to the Lord, betrays the directive bias in the mind of the inter- preter. Again, when Moses, probably to distinguish the whole body of the Israelites who journeyed orderly in bands from the mixed multitude that accom- panied them in a disorderly mass, wrote that they went out by chamshim, fifties, the Jewish mind saw in the word a vision of soldiers, and interpreted it armed ; and the hurried departure of fugitives from the apprehended passions of the Egyptian king, transformed itself in the imagination of the Jew into the exulting departure of a military expedition bent on the conquest of Canaan. This exordium natu- rally prepares us to find the entrance of the tribes into Canaan interpreted as commanded to be, what indeed it was made, a mere hostile invasion.* * Though the most probable and consistent translation of charnu- shim is by fifties, it cannot be positively asserted that the text should be so translated. However there is no reason whatever for translating the word, armed. Chamsliim is fifty ; the short u in chamtishim is merely a Rabbinical suggestion, no part of the text; still we should expect chamshim to be duplicated if the meaning was by fifties. Pagninus translates it quintati , and after PATHS TO DWELL LN. i39 4. It must sometimes liave happened that trans- lators of writings so full of knowledge above man’s conception as the Scriptures are, unable in places to translate confidently, have given a conventional sense where they could not attain to give the exact meaning. All translators will be obliged to do the same occasionally. But having to select a probable him the margin of Matthew Parker’s Bible has “ set in order jive by jive , as the word doth signify.” The Babbins find the meaning armed in the numeral jive , because they derive chomesh , a vital part of the body, from chamshi, jive , as being below the fifth false rib, and unprotected, and therefore requiring defensive armour. Abner smote Azahel under the fifth rib, chomesh (2 Sam. ii. 23). The words chamshi and chomesh possi- bly have no relation one to the other. The lexicons give an Arabic word chamosh , with the meaning nimble , which suits very well the Sept, translation of chamushim , tv^iovoi. We may remember that the Israelites ate the first Passover in the equipment in which they were to leave Egypt, which equip- ment was long held indispensable at all celebrations of the Pass- over, thus shall ye eat it, your loins girded , your shoes on your feet, and your staff in your hand (Exod. xii. 11). This was the equipment of pastoral, not military emigrants. They were also, when leaving Egypt, encumbered with their kneading troughs and clothes on their shoulders (Exod. xii. 34) ; and were so far from being equipped, or fit for bearing arms, that the Lord led them by a long circuit lest they should be terrified by the mere sight of a hostile tribe. They learnt their fighting habits subsequently where they learnt their idolatry, in the wilderness. 140 THE RESTORATION OF meaning, the speciality of the Scriptures compels the translator to see that his probable interpretation is consistent with the tenor of Scripture ; hut this rule does not seem to have been consistently ob- served. The Tempter promised Eve that if she and Adam disobeyed they should be as gods knowing good and evil . And in our English version the Lord is made to say that they became such by obeying the Tempter, consequently what the Tempter promised was the truth ; which is difficult to reconcile with the title of Liar , given him by Christ. Without stopping to consider whether elohim, in the argument addressed by the Tempter to Eve, ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil, means gods, or, as it sometimes does men in power, such as judges, it, may with confidence be said that to know good and evil is not to knoiv good from evil, which the Hebrew would express by saying, to know betiveen good and between evil, but the original does not say this ; but to knoiv, in this place, has the meaning of to practise, to have a practical acquaintance; and to know good and evil means to practise either one or the other as a man likes, without regard to the law. The Tempter advised Eve to be a judge of what was right for PATHS TO DWELL LN. H 1 her to do, and not to allow the Lord to decide for her. When the man had followed the Tempter’s advice, the Lord is represented, in all translations, as con- fessing that the Tempter has been a true prophet ; and that the man, by disobedience, had become like * one of the persons of the Holy Trinity, like one of us to know good and evil. We who know the Gospel hesitate to suppose that man is transformed into the likeness of God by acquaintance with evil in addition to his acquaint- ance with good. And we reject the translation as soon as we look into it. But it is very possible that translators such as the Alexandrian Seventy, the originators of this view of the passage, acquainted, not with the Gospel, but with the Babylonian theology (which taught that the Divinity compre- hended both an evil and a good principle, a theory diffused then more widely far than the true concep- tion of the Almighty), might thoughtlessly have represented man as becoming like the Deity by being admitted to the knowledge of good and evil ; and might have thought that they saw this ex- pressed in the original before them. 142 THE RESTORATION OF Here then, not the context merely, but the whole tenor of Scripture, all Prophets and Apostles, every- thing, in fact, elsewhere revealed, rises up against the current translation, and denies its claim to be an interpretation, and not only the compulsion of common sense, but also the grammatical construction of passages in the original Hebrew of like construc- tion with the one in question, call on us to translate it, the man who was like one of us (having been made in our image, after our likeness) has turned to 'practise evil as well as good . In a similarly constructed and grammatically parallel passage all translators have inserted turned as it is inserted above, compelled thereto by the sense, as (1 Sam. xiv. 21) : The Hebrews that were with the Philistines before that time , even they also turned to be wijth the Israelites. Consistency with the tenor of Scripture seems to require the insertion in the first instance as strongly as the sense requires it in the second. Here then we seem to detect another disturbing element, deranging the uniform and consistent cur- rent of truth, whilst transfusing it into the new channel of a translation ; so that the interpreter of PATHS TO DWELL LN. H3 the spirit abhors the translator of the letter. There is One Spirit, and only one, by which the Scriptures were dictated, and by which they must be under- stood. There have been man y translators, and many tempers in which they have translated. The temper which interpreters allow themselves to indulge in is shown by the opinion of St. Ambrose on this passage, Irridens Deus Ikec dicit. He con- sidered it consistent with the character of the Lord to mock man in his misery : the Son of God, indeed, was cruelly mocked, but when He was reviled He reviled not again. Yet St. Ambrose in a sounder- mind contemplates the Lord’s visit to Adam after his disobedience as a visit in mercy. His observation is a strong proof of the human spirit infused into all \ translations of the Scripture out of the mind of the translator, unconsciously and ignorantly. And trans- lations of Scripture will never be to the spirit as the body of heaven in its clearness is to the sun which shines through it, until they are cleansed of the clouds of human passion which float in them and distort or shut out the perfections of the Almighty. The face of Scripture in some places is tossed about by the efforts of mere translators as though it 1 44 THE RESTORATION OF were the great deep when the winds of heaven are striving on it. There will be no harmony till the spirit of the Grospel is suffered to breathe over the whole Old Testament. 5. The prophecy concerning Immanuel (Isa. vii. 8) has been adduced as supplying an instance that the Church in translating insists that the context gives the interpretation. The part of the hook of Isaiah in which it occurs may also he here adduced as a further illustration of the manner of reasoning by which it is suggested that interpolations may he removed from their usurped places in the text, and assigned to those places in which the context suggests that they ought to appear. The whole prophecy is com- pletely contained in the following paragraph, ver. 14. Behold a virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and thou shalt call his name Immanuel. St. Matthew quotes no further : but the present text proceeds to intimate that, before the child (Im- manuel) shall know to refuse the evil and choose the good, Syria and Damascus both should lose their kings. PATHS TO DWELL LN. i45 It is evident that the text as it has long stood expresses this, and that accordingly the prophecy thus supplemented cannot apply to Christ, as St. Matthew makes it to do. We have, therefore, a choice of two things ; either to read the text as it stands, or to reject St. Matthew’s application of it to Christ. But if we read Isaiah with understanding, we find the child, in whose earliest years Samaria and Syria were to be subdued, was a child named, not Immanuel, but Maher shalalhashbaz, a name indicating this by meaning speedy laying waste; whereas the name Immanuel, God with us, indicated nothing of the kind. This perception immediately makes it apparent that the prophecy concerning Immanuel and that concerning Mahershalalhashbaz have by some lapse of an ancient copyist been inter- mingled. This becomes still more apparent when we strike out the word moreover, beginning the pro- phecy concerning Mahershalalhashbaz in the English version, and replace it from the Hebrew by the con- junction and ; for there is no such expression as moreover in the Hebrew (nor in the Greek, nor in the Latin versions) ; the English translators here, as elsewhere, having inserted a word to cover, as far L 146 THE RESTORATION OF as possible, a derangement of the text, instead of remedying it. By writing out the prophecy concerning Ma- hershalalhashbaz and connecting it with the part from which it has been dissevered, it will be seen how much is gained in consistency and meaning. The prophet, seeing that Ahaz doubted his deli- verance from the oppression of the kings of Syria and Samaria, exclaims (chap, vii, 9.), If ye will not believe surely ye ivill not be convinced; and relates how the Lord directed him to give Ahaz more confidence in the prediction by writing the prophecy, and en- rolling it as Scripture, and by naming his new-born son, Speedy laying waste. “ Take thee a great roll, and write in it with a man’s pen, concerning the speedy spoiling and plundering of those two kingdoms, and call your new-born by a name prophetic of what is to happen. During the child’s first days there will be desolation in Israel, neither reaping nor vintage, but the people will live on the milk of their cattle and the honey of the bees, but before the child shall be alle to distinguish between the names of father and mother, Syria and Samaria shall be PATHS TO DWELL IN. »47 plundered by tbe king of Assyria.” This is the paraphrase of the prophecy. In the words of the English version, when trans- posed, it reads as follows : — Chap. vii. 9. If ye will not believe, surely ye shall not be established. Chap. viii. 1. And the Lord said unto me, Take thee a great roll, and write in it, with a man’s pen, concerning making speed to the spoil, hastening to the prey. Yer. 2. And I took unto me faithful witnesses, &c. Yer. 3. And the prophetess conceived and bare a son. And the Lord said unto me, Call his name Mahershalalhashbaz. Yer. 4. For before the child shall have knowledge to cry, My father, and my mother, the riches of Damascus and the spoil of Samaria shall be taken away before the king of Assyria. Chap. vii. 15. Butter and honey shall he eat, that he may know to refuse the evil and choose the good.* * Butter and honey shall be eat implies that the child alluded to would he reared in a time of scarcity when the land was un- cultivated and bread wanting ; as was for two years the condition of Judah after the sudden irruption of the Syrians and Samarians, / 4 8 THE RESTORATION OF Ver. 16. For before the child shall know to refuse the evil and to choose the good, the land that thou abhorrest shall be forsaken of both her kings. The text required some modification, and the English translators mended it by inserting moreover , and then, without any authority and without re- moving the difficulty ; what is proposed above amounts to leaving the Hebrew unaltered, and altering the scribe’s arrangement of the text, not arbitrarily nor plausibly, but at the tacit dictation of the context and flow of the prophecy. The straits to which expositors have been driven, when seeking to explain the text without disen- tangling the one subject from the other, may be seen in Tertullian’s explaining the riches of Damascus and spoils of Samaria to mean the gold and frankincense offered by the magi to Immanuel. So dislocated, in fact, and dismembered do the contents of the Book of Isaiah appear to us when, having mastered the book as it now stands, we pro- and is described chap. vii. 21, 22. This confirms the opinion that the two verses concerning the eating of butter and honey and the fate of the two kings apply not to Immanuel but to Mahershalalhashbaz, ior the circumstances detailed occurred to the latter, not to Christ. PATHS TO DWELL IN. H9 ceed inwardly to digest its contents, that Ezra seems to us to have found the rolls of the prophet, after the captivity in the condition in which Nehemiah found the walls of Jerusalem, on his visit to it, when he viewed the walls of Jerusalem , which were broken down (Neh. ii. 13). It must have been as Rabbi David Kimchi supposes, that a complete copy could be reinstated only from the collation of many dilapi- dated ones. The book called Isaiah has never been recon- structed from the fragments ; and it is difficult to see what religio deters the Church from doing it as well as it can be done. When a Bible is published, it is for assisting, not perplexing, the people. The sixth chapter incontestibly proves itself the beginning of a great dispensation of prophecy ; the five preceding chapters should follow, not precede. In the seventh the springs and head waters of two great streams of prophecy are plainly seen to rise. One concerning salvation by the Virgin’s son, to whom the name Immanuel, God with us, is assigned. One concerning mercy and judgments ; and of this stream of prophecy the names of the prophet’s two sons are made significant— Shear Jashub, a rem - 150 THE RESTORATION OF nant shall return , of mercy ; Mahershalalhashbaz, desolation comes speedily , of judgment. When this is clearly apprehended, the matters belonging to each of these two streams of spiritual admonition, mingled now in the text of Isaiah, fall almost spontaneously into two distinct channels, in one peace is extended to the faithful as a river, in the other wrath is poured out on the wicked as water. PATHS TO DWELL LN. 1 5 1 VII. 1. Reason, Tradition, and the Spirit, as interpreters of Scripture — 2. Revealed and natural religion considered as judges of the truth. — 3. Scripture appealing to the animal creation. — 4. Behemoth and the beasts of the field. 1. Cultivated intelligence, leavened with a true sense of natural religion, has long been engaged in endeavouring to disentangle the exact purport of the utterances of the Lord, and the actual methods of his providence, from their complications with the sayings of men and the counter methods of human wilfulness ; the dispensations of Providence and the intentions of the Lord being interwoven with the processes of human systems of government and the passions of those with whom the Lord has had to deal, in the original record, the Scriptures, and still more in the current versions of it. Meantime, conscientious and studious men affirm that the work is not needed, and must be hurtful ; reckoning that the results of modern learning must 152 THE RESTORATION OF be subordinated to opinions long received ; and re- quiring tbe modern linguist and philologist to give place, as an expounder, to the schoolmen or to the ancient Fathers of the Church. Intellect, in fact, contends with tradition as to which has the secret of the Scriptures. Intellect, though professing to proceed on the principles of natural religion, has sometimes failed to remember that natural religion was not a product of intellect, and did not originally reverence reason, but stood in awe of an unseen and external power ; and, over- looking this, some have earned for themselves the title of rationalists, considering that the miraculous and the spiritual in Scripture may be reasonably understood as natural events and intellectual things. To do this, however, is not to interpret and apply the Scriptures, but to judge, contradict, and deny them. It is as though a chemist, undertaking to analyze a compound, should first reject the special agents in it, and then deal with the residuum as though it were the whole ; for the specialities of Scripture are its inspiration, its miracles, and its mysteries : if these are eliminated the hook is incon- sistent and unintelligible. PATHS TO DWELL IN. i53 On the other hand, the Scriptures are certainly darkened by those who claim a traditional interpre- tation as paramount in authority and unsurpassable in accuracy. The great Synod at Nicsea did not ask for ancient but for primitive tradition ; things pri- mitive have in them a positive speciality, which things simply ancient cannot certainly have : opinions not yet developed will some day be ancient, but they will never be primitive, though they may be true. For primitive doctrine did not express all the truth that can be known, the Spirit being promised to the Church to guide her into all truth by our Lord in words which mean, equally, that all to which the Spirit leads us is true ; and that there is no guide to the truth but the Spirit ; and that the Spirit will ever be guiding those who profit by it, not in framing additional truths, but in exploring spaces and perceiving features of truth which have always been before the Church in the Scriptures, though overlooked or not discerned ; truths that can add nothing to the outline of the body of faith, the Creed, but which do fill up that outline with har- monious component parts. Neither therefore has primitive teaching, nor has J 54 THE RESTORATION OF ancient exposition, perfected our knowledge of the Scriptures, nor has any version done more than stereotype the knowledge of their import in the form to which it had attained at the time of the version, no further. Hence an ancient or mediaeval exposition, though it may show the light then shin- ing when it was given, yet if viewed as complete and final, interposes itself as a veil, shutting out and darkening the light that is yet to he given. As the Lord’s intention with regard to the indi- vidual member of the Church is, that he shall grow in knowledge, not satisfied in manhood with the spiritual attainments which he had reached in youth ; so with regard to the collective Church, that she shall not rest in the knowledge to which the Fathers of the early centuries could attain, sufficient and laudable in them, hut less than ought to have been attained to by the Church in these ages. And this greater and better knowledge ought certainly to be exhibited to her people by the Church of England in a riper authorised version and edition of the Bible. A version, better, not because it shall express more plainly than before the articles of the faith once for all delivered to the Church, for the Spirit PATHS TO DWELL IN. i55 interpreted them by the lips of Christ or of the Apostles, so that we unconsciously read such places in the Old Testament with the eyes of the Apostles, not with our own ; hut better, because in it the records of God’s dealing with nations and indi- viduals shall he so set forth in it that the things which are God’s shall be attributed to Him, and the attempts of men to carry out or cross the purposes of the Lord shall also he so set forth, that the things that are Caesar’s shall he assigned to Caesar ; the kingdom and the people of God being sifted out, in the process of translation, from the kingdom and people of Israel. We should have no grounds for hoping that a version of Scripture is attainable, which, without corrupting the original, shall yet make the hook speak more worthily concerning God, did we not know that inspired sayings must have in them a living seed of truth ordained to ever more and more fruitfulness in proportion as they are watered from the Spirit poured out from on high ; and that the Lord, having redeemed his people, has committed the growth of the Word, as of the Church, to the abiding power of the Spirit. THE RESTORATION OF 156 The early Church, that of the Fathers, looked to the Spirit answering her prayer for guidance into the meaning of the Scriptures, and they prospered in applying it to the need of the Church in their days ; afterwards, the Church looked too readily to the art of the schoolmen as framers of conclusions and producers of proofs of dogmas out of Scripture ; the Spirit was thought to work by the dialectitian. Thenceforth new forms and species of beliefs, such as belief in the intercessory office of the mother of our Lord, appeared ; as if the matter of faith had first existed, in the Gospel, as some philosophers say substance first appeared, at the Creation, a formless protoplasm, capable of self- development and of elaboration into ever new forms and species. Many of these the Church suffered to be incorporated into her system, then taught as wholesome, finally in- sisted on as necessary. In still later times, and in our own days, the Church has looked on whilst the scholastic theologian and the rationalist have been actively and loudly contending before men, one against the other, as to whether of them shall prevail in establishing in men’s minds his own views of the ways of God’s providence and of the PATHS TO DWELL LN. *57 methods of his dispensations ; angering at times, by her utterances, the schoolman by taxing him with superstitious mediae vali sms, and irritating the ra- tionalist by denying the sincerity of his motives ; but leaving her people to the guidance of conven- tional commentators, in whose opinions she tacitly acquiesced, but which she never authoritatively sanctioned ; herself still using a stereotyped ancient version which she treated as though it were as un- improvable as her Creed, though having the inter- preting Spirit, if she would use it. The rationalist will still say that nothing can be divinely ordered unless it approves itself to natural religion ; the Church affirms that spiritual religion is to be tested by the Spirit. Bishop Butler long ago interposed between these contending powers, say- ing, “Ye are brethren;” but they who had done the Church wrong, in reply, charged the Church with seeking to drive reason from office in man’s mental convictions, saying, “Wilt thou kill reason as thou did’st sin?” as she aimed at expunging sin from the sources of his motives, saying, “ Ye are dead unto sin.” The intellect and reason are supreme in matters THE RESTORATION OF »58 of science, and it happens that here and there in Scripture, as, for instance, in the account of the creation, there are in the Scripture narrative some things which the geologist thinks are geological, and the astronomer reckons astronomical. There is doctrine in every one of such passages in Scripture, and if there he science also, it is accidental not material. The Almighty, in speaking to the illi- terate Israelites of things such as the solar system, had to enunciate certain facts concerning it in such terms that, while they continued illiterate, they might not apprehend false science from his utter- ances, and also so that, if ever his people became wise in natural science, they might not refute his utterances on the evidence of discovered facts. This offered no difficulty to an infinite intellect. But as an understanding of the processes of crea- tion is immaterial to the believer, who is saved by the redemption, not by the creation of the world, the Spirit gives no help to the Church in reconciling the inspired record with the scientific theory of creation. The first chapter of Genesis is thought to he capable of many interpretations simply because PATHS TO DWELL LN. i59 hitherto the Spirit has not supplied the one true solution ; not because it is more abstruse or obscure than chapters which treat of redemption, nor from any special inherent difficulty in its diction. W e consider the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah plain and obvious to the reader ; but it is so only because the Spirit has interpreted it. Had not the Spirit done so, the chamberlain of Queen Candace might have asked Philip for an explanation in vain, just as the geologist may ask the Church in vain for an exposition of the first chapter of Genesis. Nor need the Church shrink from acknowledging her inability to interpret the science in it ; for the way of life has indeed been revealed and expounded to her, the processes of creation revealed, but not expounded. The time will come when the Spirit will expound this also to her. Hence we see that the interpreting power of the Church is limited, first, to those spaces within the circle of the Scriptures which deal with the redemp- tion of mankind ; next, to those that treat of and justify the processes of the moral government of the world by the goodness of God. Since, then, it would appear that there are some i6o THE RESTORATION OF things in the Bible which the Church has no com- mission to interpret, it should be well and widely- understood that there is a wide freedom allowed to framers of interpretations on such parts of the Bible, which a man may indulge in without being thought to impugn the judgment of the Church in matters of faith in the Scriptures, because he believes Scripture to admit of, or countenance, an unusual or novel interpretation on matters not of faith. It is still more important that all persons should know that commentaries are not Church doctrine, especially on such matters. For the Church is gene- rally considered by men of scientific studies to ignore sound science and to sanction and advocate erroneous science. It may be said with much truth that the Church of Borne has made the Ptolemoean astronomy the canonical astronomy ; but the collective Church, from the first, has been preserved from complicating her doctrines with science, the inspired writers quoting the phenomena of nature without propound- ing scientific facts, much as the Apostles here and there quote an uninspired book without thereby investing it with the dignity of Scripture. It is lamentable indeed that some should think PATHS TO DWELL IN. 1 61 themselves to differ from the Church because they differ from theories which commentators have be- guiled men to suppose Church doctrines ; and to suppose that the Scriptures are defective or incon- sistent because the wording of a current version is so. Even those who form such opinions do so with regret, and unwillingly; Scripture is too majestic to be lightly disregarded, and too imperative to be silenced ; and all men have an opinion, more or less distinctly conceived, that the original Scriptures are capable of an interpretation which would exhibit them in all parts acceptable to those who receive the TcavTO, t(j)vpav , a? to pev pcuyeLcts rbu these things together, neither perceiving what pertained to Magian writings, nor discerning what was from the Scriptures, mixed things together, taking the name Hebrew Scriptures labial. St. Epiphanius also of these heretics glorify laldabaoth, calling him the son of Bar Bel. And Tertullian also mentions this name laldabaoth as being the highest of the iEons t tj