Here, for example, is a grand plane of literary observation and loftiness. The air is bracing, a tonic to weak chests surfeited with library hot house forcings and environments. Then too the moral upliftings which one gets! The sense of presences invisible to eye, unheard, untouched: presences recent from heaven. Oh how one’s littlenesses and inferiorities, one’s shortcomings and dwarfedness feel the rebuke of loftier spirits, speechless, but loftier. Here are theologic forests and drives through green carpeted woods that smell of myrrh and balsam, even as though his footsteps and his garments had just passed.
Yonder is an apocalyptic plateau, an island of the sky, from whose top all heaven is visible. Are not these things helps? to preacher? teacher? scholar? Hear just one word from Paul. It puts us on that plateau yonder. He tells the Romans (i:20), “For the invisible things of him, since the creation of the world, are clearly seen, being perceived through the things that are made, even his everlasting power and divinity.” He tells the Ephesians (ii:10), “For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works.” In these two passages the italicized words are the same. They are not found elsewhere in all the Bible. The word is poiema. From its plateau we discover the harmonies and the unity of the uni-verse of God—the oneness of Deity with us dirt. God is discovered, un-covered in the poiema—the poem of Nature: so that the heathen are excuseless. We are God’s poiema—the poem of Grace recreated in Jesus Christ.
Ah, to find that one word, to stand upon its apocalyptic summit and to see, is worth four years’ climbing, though it should be harder than up Katahdin’s gorges, steeper than the icy sides horrific of Mt. Blanc.
But, in addition to this telescopic vision-range, the Greek student gets at the infinities below him. The water drop is essentially, if not integrally, an ocean. Infinity is unthinkable in any direction: just as unthinkable when one thinks along the diameter towards the center of a sphere as when one thinks in reverse direction.
So there is here philological microscopy; of words and letters even: all valuable, sometimes necessary to any knowledge, always disciplinary. Paul writes to Timothy, (iii: 16) “Great is the mystery of godliness: God was manifest in the flesh.” Thus some Mss. But others make Paul say, “Great is the mystery, etc., he who was manifested in the flesh.” The Mss. differ only in a letter, scarcely that. The difference is just that between an Ο and a θ. Hair splitting? Yet on that one hair hangs doctrine, and duty, and destiny. And Ellicott has split this hair out of the Alexandrine Ms. One case of intricate and extraordinary surgery well performed, establishes the surgeon’s fame and fortune in a day. Ellicott’s treatment of this passage—fascinating as a romance, and romantic in its fascination, the very quality of reading which the ill-trained judicial faculties of some pastors need—his treatment of this passage is one of the triumphs of philological microscopy. Of no utility? Do this kind of work and the use will appear in one’s own self.
[To be continued.]
