Replies.
MARRIAGE OF ECCLESIASTICS.
(Vol. iv. pp. 57. 125. 193. 196. 298.)
Your general readers have reason to be as much obliged as myself to your correspondents CEPHAS and K. S. for the information contained in the former's criticisms, and the latter's addition to what you had inserted in my name on the subject of clerical marriages.
CEPHAS is very fair, for he does not find fault with other persons' versions of the first part of Heb. xiii. 4. without giving his own version to be compared; and he states the ground of his criticisms on my reference to it. He has kindly told your readers, what they might have conjectured from the Italics in our authorized version, that in rendering Τίμιος ὁ γάμος ἐν πᾶσι, "Marriage is honourable in all," they inserted is; and to show your readers an example of keeping closer to the original, he himself renders it as follows: "Let (the laws of) marriage be revered in all things, and the marriage bed be undefiled."
Then comes his exposure of my unhappy mistake: "H. WALTER mistakes the adjective feminine ἐν πᾶσι as meaning all men." Really, had I known that πᾶσι was an adjective feminine, I could scarcely have fallen into the mistake of supposing it to mean all men. But many of your readers will be likely to feel some sympathy for my error, while they learn from CEPHAS that the ordinary Greek grammars, in which they can have proceeded but a very few pages before they read and were called upon to repeat the cases of πας, πασα, παν, were quite wrong in teaching us that though πᾶσι might be either masculine or neuter, it must not be taken for a feminine form. But before we correct this error in one of the first pages of our grammar, I presume that we should all like to know from what recondite source CEPHAS has discovered that πασι, and not πασαις, is the feminine form of this constantly-recurring adjective.
But farther, p. 193. will show that I did not give him a right to assume that I should construe πασι "all men." For under my mistaken view of its being masculine, I thought the weaker sex was included; and being myself a married man, I knew that marriage comprehends women as well as men.
But there is still more to be learnt from the criticisms of CEPHAS, which the learned world never knew before. For, having told us that πᾶσι is an adjective feminine, he adds, "it signifies here in all things;" whereas the grammars have long taught that things must not be understood unless the adjective be neuter. Perhaps he had better concede that the grammars have not been wrong in allowing that πᾶσι may be neuter; and then, as we know that it is also masculine, and he knows it to be feminine, it must be admitted to be of all genders, and so young learners will be spared all the trouble of distinguishing between them. If it be admitted that πᾶσι is neuter here, it may signify all things.
My other mistake, he says, has been that of not perceiving that the imperative let should be supplied, instead of the indicative be. This must be allowed to be open to debate; but as the proper meaning of τίμιος is "to be esteemed honourable," "had in reputation" (Acts v. 34.), will it be a mistake to say, that the primitive Christians would properly respect marriage, in their clergy as well as in others, on the ground of the Scriptures saying, "Let marriage be esteemed honourably in every respect?" Could they properly want ground for allowing it to the clergy, when they could also read 1 Tim. iii. 2. 11., and Titus i. 6.? As CEPHAS quotes the Vulgate for authority in favour of enim in the next clause, he might have told your readers to respect its authority in rendering the first clause, "Honorabile connubium in omnibus." And if he has no new rules for correcting Syriac as well as Greek, that very ancient version, though the gender of the adjective be ambiguous in the equivalent to πᾶσι, renders the next clause, "and their couch is pure," showing that persons were understood.
Next comes K. S., who tells your readers that Whiston quotes the well-known Doctor Wall for evidence as to the prohibition of second marriages among the Greek clergy, before the Council of Nice. I should like to know something of this well-known Doctor. There was a well-known Mr. Wall, who wrote on baptism; and there was a Don Ricardo Wall, a Spanish minister of state, well known in his day, and there was a Governor Wall, too well known from his being hanged; but I cannot find that any of these was a Doctor, so as to be the well-known Doctor Wall, whose "authority no one would willingly undervalue," (p. 299.) As for poor Whiston, his name was well known too, as a bye-word for a person somewhat crazy, when he quitted those mathematical studies which compelled him to fix his mind on his subject with steadiness whilst pursuing them. K. S. has told us that he terms "the Apostolic Constitutions the most sacred of the canonical books of the New Testament." Such an opinion is quite enough as a test of Whiston's power of judging in such questions. After much discussion, the most learned of modern investigators assigns the compilation of the first six books of those Constitutions to the end of the third century, and the eighth to the middle of the fourth.
In the remarks to which CEPHAS has thus adverted, I gave some evidence of marriages among ecclesiastics, at later dates than your correspondent supposes such to have been allowed. Can he disprove that evidence? (See Vol. iv., p. 194.)