I dare not affirm that this is erroneously said; but it is one of the comparatively few passages that are of service as reminding me that it is not the Scripture that I am reading. Not the qualities merely, but the root of the qualities is trans-created. How else could it be a birth,—a creation?
Ib. p. 170.
This natural life is compared, even by natural men, to the vainest things, and scarce find they things light enough to express it vain; and as it is here called grass, so they compare the generations of men to the leaves of trees. * * * Man that is born of a woman is of few days, and full of trouble. He cometh forth like a flower and is cut down. Job xiv. 1, 2. Psalm xc. 12; xxxix. 4.
It is the fashion to decry scholastic distinctions as useless subtleties, or mere phantoms—
entia logica, vel etiam verbalia solum
. And yet in order to secure a safe and Christian interpretation to these and numerous other passages of like phrase and import in the Old Testament, it is of highest concernment that we should distinguish the personeity or spirit, as the source and principle of personality, from the person itself as the particular product at any one period, and as that which cannot be evolved or sustained but by the co-agency of the system and circumstances in which the individuals are placed. In this latter sense it is that
man
is used in the Psalms, in Job, and elsewhere—and the term made synonymous with flesh. That which constitutes the spirit in man, both for others and itself, is the real man; and to this the elements and elementary powers contribute its bulk (
