“For as the Father raiseth up the dead, and quickeneth them; even so the Son quickeneth whom he will.” “That all men should honour the Son, even as they honour the Father.” “The bread of God is he which came down from heaven, and giveth life unto the world.” “And this is the will of Him that sent me, that every one which seeth the Son, and believeth on him, may have everlasting life: and I will raise him up at the last day.” “I am the light of the world; he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life.” “I and my Father are one.” “Jesus saith unto her, I am the resurrection and the life: he that believeth on me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.”—How Christ should have preferred SUCH claims without legitimate authority, and ample power to substantiate them, is a question to which we cannot divine an answer.
[30] Some striking illustrations of this position are to be found in the Appendix to Mr. Stanley’s recent volume on Sinai and Palestine. This Appendix consists of a vocabulary of topographical words in Hebrew and English. Great care has been taken in giving the precise English for the corresponding Hebrew term. Referring to the previous part of his work, he says, “I have often had occasion to refer to the richness and precision of the local vocabulary of the Hebrew language. In the authorized version this is unfortunately lost; not so much by the incorrect rendering of any particular word, as by the promiscuous use of the same English word for different Hebrew words, or of different English words for the same Hebrew word.” And again: “The geographical passages of the Bible seem to shine with new light as these words acquire their proper force. How keenly, for example, are we led to notice the early tendency to personify and treat as living creatures the great objects of nature, when we find that the ‘springs’ are the ‘eyes,’ the bright, glistening, life-giving eyes of the thirsty East; that the mountains have not merely summits and sides, but ‘heads,’ ‘shoulders,’ ‘ears,’ ‘ribs,’ ‘loins,’ &c.” This whole Appendix is deeply interesting to the Hebrew student. He must feel at the same time how much the mere English student of Scripture suffers in the absence of the same knowledge.
[31] “They who have access to the Scriptures in the original are . . . endowed with ten talents, compared with which the power of reading them in our authorized version is but one. The right improvement of the one talent will ensure to its possessor the end of his faith, even the salvation of his soul; but this does not render guiltless those who have greater talents if, from supineness and indolence, they neglect to use the enlarged means with which they are gifted for attaining to the knowledge of the truth.”—“Introduction to the Greek Testament, with Grammatical and Exegetical Notes, by William Webster, M.A., and William Francis Wilkinson, M.A.,” p. xvi. The above work has special claims upon that numerous class who, with little time for elaborate research, are glad to obtain the results of a thorough critical investigation of the language and teaching of the New Testament.
[34] The following is from Lewes’s “Life of Goethe,” just published. The words in double inverted commas are those of Goethe himself: ‘“I had a large collection of weapons, and among them a very handsome dagger. This I placed by my bedside every night, and before extinguishing my candle I made various attempts to pierce the sharp point a couple of inches into my breast; but not being able to do it I laughed myself out of the notion,” &c. He played with suicidal thoughts, because he was restless, and suicide was a fashionable speculation of the day,’ &c. . . . In October, 1772 the report reaches him that his Wetzlau friend, Goué, has shot himself. “Write to me at once about Goué,” he says to Kestner, “I honour such an act, and pity mankind,” &c.—Vol. I. p. 197. There is more to this abominable purpose in the sequel. Such was Goethe, a man sprung from the people, not the offspring of an effete noblesse, and at a time of life when the very thought of self-destruction is most alien to all the instincts of nature,—‘a canker in youth,’—and with no taint of constitutional melancholy in his system. Goethe’s genius was a sea of glass, capable of reflecting the rays cast upon it from without with unusual brilliancy; but, unlike our Shakspeare, devoid of independent power of originating new thought. Thus he reflected all his days the prevailing fashion of his time, and thus he but re-enacts the sentimentalism of the hour in his suicidal lucubrations.
[35] The policy of Pericles may be considered in relation to the causes that aggrandize a people. His notion seems to have been that to awaken great deeds in a nation you must supply it with great and noble thoughts. Hence his magnificent public buildings, his lavish cultivation of the arts, and even the attention he paid to the amusements of the people, to make them subservient to refinement and purity of taste. But æsthetics alone do not make a great people.—See Thuc. II., 38, 39.
[37a] Luke xii. 51.
[37b] Sinai and Palestine, p. 369.