1. It is easily learned by any one who can easily learn anything. A lady complained to her pastor that she was greatly in doubt about her Christian character, because she could not recollect Bible passages, though she had just read them. The pastor did not tell her the old story of a similar case where the hermit answered by pouring water into a basin; wiping it dry, he said, “You see the basin holds none of the water, yet it is cleaner.” But he instantly suspected the true state of the case. “How much of anything you read do you retain in mind?” “Why, nothing,” she replied; “I’ve been that way always.” Here was mental defect, not moral obliquity. She couldn’t learn Greek any more readily than anything else.
Now to all persons not mentally incapable of learning anything, Bible Greek presents special helps to enthusiasm, and hence to success.
2. It is the language God chose as the vehicle of his Gospel. There must be in it the qualities suited to the needs of an Apocalypse of God, or he would have selected a language more capable of containing and of expressing such a revelation. Hence this fact is inspirational as a sentiment. We study the very words of God. We come nearest and most directly to the oracle, to the secrets of Deity.
We are admitted to the sanctum sanctorum of his counsels, who spake in Jesus Christ and his apostles the “wonderful words of life.” But we need not rely upon the sentimental virtues of Bible Greek inspiration for evidence in proof that the language itself helps the student of it.
3. Bible Greek, like Bible Hebrew, is essentially the vehicle of spiritual conceptions and of spiritual truths. The spiritual in man can find no loftier expressions of “what is in man,” than in New Testament Greek.
4. The very construction of the language, its idioms, the mental view points involved in its structure and mechanism, are themselves helps. With the Greeks thought was not indefinite as too largely is the case with us. They never dealt in that commodity of which certain æsthetes recently in this country appeared to have possessed the monopoly; i. e. “unthunk thoughts.”
The Greeks did not think “about” things. They thought at things, or they thought out things, or they thought things. Thucydides said that the Greeks could not bear to think of things future as though not already within their grasp. Hence we find their language largely uses the present for the future tense. This present tense mode of thought, bringing everything directly before their eyes, contributed not a little to that definiteness of conception and of expression which characterizes the language throughout. It was both the cause and the effect of Greek exactness and of tetheredness in thought and speech.
Every preacher should at least read Blackstone: if possible, he should take the full law course, not alone to know the principles of common law, but also and especially for style’s sake; to know how to state things exactly, economically. Verbiage is expensive. It burdens speed. It weakens force. It is the mark of a mind untrained. Bible Greek helps the preacher just at this point. Let him master the language and he will unconsciously think in the very channels along which the tides of Greek thought, feeling, emotion, and sentiment glide, never overflowing their banks into the flat and boundless marshes of nowhereness.
FASCINATIONS OF THE JOURNEY.
1. The Bible Greek student is continually helped in his studies by the fascinations of his journey. On every side arise new friends to call him blessed. It is no arid desert which invites his footsteps. The land flows with milk and honey. No wild beasts are there: no enemy. It is God’s land: his Eden where he walks and talks with the true Adam.