teaching would become more parabolic and pictorial, and Gospel truth, and all truth, now presented in a dry, didactic, imperfect, unsuggestive, form by at best able ministers of' not 'the spirit' but the letter,' would be coloured, shaped, and almost scented, by the natural, sacramental symbol-language which all love and all understand, from the Sunday. school to the University and from the prince to the cottager. The sovereign mistake of professional men, laity and clergy, is using up one part of the brain whilst all the rest is left to be enfeebled for want of exercise. Empiric Civilisation, moreover, is the penalty of Empiric Theology. The system of education received by tradition from our fathers -commercial as well as classical-stereotypes in the 'secular' the corresponding baneful error which has wrought such evil in the 'religious.' And the harm is not confined to the spiritual part, for no injury, either from exhausting one part of the brain or impoverishing the other, can fail to draw those organic parts of the body, dependent correlatively upon the corresponding parts of the brain, into the disorganisation entailed. A full-orbed brain giving out symmetrical thought, means a body in healthy action. Our Lord's theology was sacramental theology. Many ministers are intensely ambitious of being able preachers, but the genuine orator-as contradistinguished from the mere rhetorician or the fluent public speaker—is as dependent upon illustrations as the walking thing upon legs or the flying upon wings; the heart when 'burning within us' with true love to God, and so to man, in impregnable unselfishness,

* Isaac Taylor, that master of condensed common sense, says: 'Our biblical industry is all devoted to "the letter;" and it must be confessed that exegetical erudition abounds in a very fair degree. But these lower studies-indispensable indeed-fall in marvellously well with the frigid timidity of the age and its love of palpable utility; they run glibly side by side with those practical and applicatory sciences which are receiving universal homage. And yet we would not invite the return of some one of the obsolete schemes of theology. The Platonic, or profound and meditative theology, after a long reign, fell before the activity and tactics of the Aristotelian, or logical and disputatious. Then this, having lived to its dotage, received a deadly wound from the hand of the Reformers, who erected in its place its image, the Dogmatic theology; to this all men did obeisance, and still in measure do, for it has never given place to a successor, nor been formally consigned to oblivion. Nevertheless it exists rather in skeleton, to fill an unclaimed chair of state, than exercises any positive domination. Nothing rises in the room of the ancient systems; there is silence in the halls of sacred science, as if men were waiting in expectation of the descent upon earth of the bright and fair form of Celestial Wisdom.' That heavenly visitant, whose approach was detected (and hastened) by this patient and subtle spiritual astronomer, has arrived in the form of Sacramental Theology. The "skeleton" which 'fills'-or, rather, keeps empty-the Divinity chair of state,' must not be ejected, but over it must pass the power of the Spirit of Ezekiel's "valley of vision;" in response to the prayers of God's people and the inspired preaching of Christ's Church, "from the four winds" of the cosmos will come the Pentecostal Spirit, with præ-millennial volume and vigour, and breathe upon those "dry bones," "and they shall live." Over the skeleton of dead orthodoxy will come the sinews and flesh of the human and natural and the brain and soul of the Spiritual and intellectual; and glorious will be the reign of the already begun millennial Gospel system of truth from the centre, the throne of the cosmical church of the English-tongued races. (See note on Apocalypse, ii. 6, the Analysis of the Seven Churches under 'Laodicæa,' and xvi. 12.) Mark iv. 34.

Practical application

to evolving a scientific

translation from the Inspired text.

will soon unseal the chambers of imagery' in the brain; at the same time private practice in trying to find and working out parabolic illustrations is the secret of learning the Art. Yes, it comes to this, the greater the actual poet the greater the possible preacher, he is the vates; and the more Spiritual the naturalist the profounder and more subtle the theologian; for 'without a parable spake He not unto them, and when He was alone He interpreted all things to His disciples.' And this, His own Theological system, The Master imposes on His ministers, for He went on to say, Therefore every scribe which is instructed unto the kingdom of heaven is like unto a man that is a householder which bringeth forth out of his treasures things new and old,'* 'first of all that which is natural, afterwards that which is spiritual.'

Now it is necessary to explain the way in which the Inductive method of induction is to be applied in the practical details of a scientific translation (the only hope of scientific theology) so as to evolve into life and vigour the meaning which peradventure sleepeth and must be awaked out of the sleep of a (now) dead language to be rehabilitated in corresponding English. A word or two first about the language into which it has to be transferred. The resemblance, in characteristics, of Hebrew, Greek, and English, is too close to be accidental; what good old Tyndale, the first+ genuine translator of the Old Testament from the original Hebrew into English, said of Hebrew as regards English, is still more true of Greek as regards English. 'Ye Greke tongue agreeth more with ye Englysh than with ye Latyne; and ye properties of ye Hebrew tongue agree a thousand times more with ye Englyshe than with ye Latyne.' The Latin Church, with shrewd and characteristic instincts of self-preservation, has from the first of the revival of learning in Europe bitterly persecuted its perilous rival Greek. Classical Greek early escaped from her direct control, and has been translated very successfully; but the Greek of the Inspired Canon she has jealously guarded in the deepest dungeon of her fortress. Although translated into English, our version is redolent of the gloom and atmosphere of the Latin schools. Latin-impregnated scholarship, ‡ the legitimate offspring of Latin Christianity, has, up to the present hour, held as in an enchanted castle the intellects of our own (actually 'protesting'!) Bible translators, and, in our present version, the Latin *Not 'old and new.'

† Wycliffe's version (A.D. 1380) was only from the Vulgate, the Latin translation of the Bible by Jerom in the fourth century, and in MS., Tyndale's (A.D. 1526) was direct from the Hebrew and Greek, and was printed. Jerom's Latin Vulgate the standard of dogma in the Church of Rome, so far as it has any Biblical standard at all-is not in the Old Testament the translation of the Inspired Word of God, but merely of a Greek translation from the original Hebrew made about (B.C. 285), at Alexandria in Egypt, and called the 'Septuagint,' which, although of great value, (since it is often quoted by our Lord and the sacred writers) is not the matrix of inspiration.

Our universities, if not out of the womb of Latin Christianity, drained her breasts and were dandled upon her knees-Sur les genoux de l'église,' as a French writer says.

Vulgate was but too substantially for the English Church the standard of interpretation into the authorised version of the mind of God; even our noble Reformers came under the apostate spell in their writings, from which their vivâ voce witness was comparatively free. Not until completely disenchanted and free, can any translator render even the natural Greek of the New Testament into the natural English—as in the translations of secular Greek authors-without reference at all to the ignoring of covenant promises of special aid herein from the 'free Spirit' of 'a jealous God.' Speaking generally, as of spirit and characteristics, colloquial Greek, the cosmopolitan language of the civilised world of its day, may be pictorially described in its relation to (not Elizabethan, or the purest, but colloquial) English, which promises to be the cosmopolitan tongue of the entire world of our own times, as the bud to the fullblown rose-much the same flower but at different stages of development -Greek for the Apostolic times, English for the revival and expansion of their witness in these latter times.' The superiority of living English over dead Greek lies in its many-sidedness, which has been caused by the ease with which it has helped itself from other languages, which renders it suitable for the triumphant application and exhibition of the inductive method of translation to a degree beyond contemporary rivalry; whereas the extraordinary condensation of the Greek fits it in the highest degree for being the literal text of God's Inspiring Mind in the most wieldy and succinct form, whilst keeping His revelation only partially unfolded until the world was educated enough, scientifically, to extract larger and larger meanings. This leads to the notice of some of the principal details of the general application of the inductive method to the text.

(1.) In the first place, everywhere, the same word in the Greek is rendered by the same word in English. Any exception to this primary rule of inductive interpretation which is worth it, and is not self-evident, is explained.

(2.) Second in importance comes emphasis. So consistently cosmical and æsthetic is the Greek language, that a Greek sentence may be compared to a portion of a landscape, so perfect is the perspective it presents of relative ideas, not only in the historical and biographical, but also in the doctrinal and didactic parts. Great pains have been taken, by different types and other means, to preserve the graphic eloquence of the Greek inductively in the English fac-simile.

*The Christian Church has inherited from the Jewish Church-together with her fatal legacy of traditionalism-an infatuated scholarship of the letter' which has used the university system of the Western Churches as its throne, up to the present time. Consequently the Greek of the Greek Testament is comparatively an unworked mine of spiritual truth; reserved, in God's providence, for this generation to work scientifically on inductive principles. It reminds one of coal, which is said to hold locked up the sunshine of former geological ages, but which we, the children of 'the ends of the earth,' extract from the mine, and then set the sunshine free, to light our streets and homes, and warm our palaces and cottages.

(3.) Again, the order in Greek is natural—as contrasted with the artificial, in (say) Latin. This order is so exactly preserved in the translation that, practically, it is word for word. The (natural) Greek distils its own meaning and its own order into equivalent (natural) English words— words, for the very idioms (and prepositions even) of the two languages, being so true to Nature, are so alike that variation in this verbal order is seldom necessary for making even the idiom of the translation the same as that of the original. The exceptions (though frequent) to this rule of word for word translation are seldom in idea-words, but are chiefly in constantly recurring conjunctions and particles of a non-essential kind.

(4.) As several words, however, are often required in English to attempt to render one pregnant Greek word, they are linked always by hyphens, or grouped in Italics, and the attempt has thus been made to preserve the same number of words in the translation so exactly-as well as the order—that the number of (often grouped) words in this English fac-simile in every verse in the Testament is (almost) exactly the same as in the Greek Testament; and, thus, if the Greek text were added, nothing would be easier than (by a little distortion) to put the Greek words one after the other over the top of the English just as it is here in this work.

* This has not been the result of any particular effort or aim; if necessary, it could be made more literally word for word still by Græcising the English idiom.

PART II.

THE GRAMMAR OF GREEK TESTAMENT TEXT ANALYSIS.

The Analysis in this Work so thorough as almost to parse each Sentence to the Eye of the Reader.-Character of the Annotations.-Perfection of the Greek Tense System. The Aorists the Centre of the Inductive Working of the Verbs.-Anglicised Greek Words.-The Relativity of the Article.-Some Words in Greek which must be carefully Contradistinguished.—The Greek Prepositional System essentially Scientific, their working carefully Explained.-The Bible Analysis of Sin. The Punctuation in this Work later on in the Epistles and Apocalypse peculiar.-The Text used. 'Various Readings.'

in this work so thorough

parse each

ENOUGH has been said to suggest the general nature of Inductive inter- The analysis pretation previous to its actual study in the text itself, in which alone the wonders that it works will be realised, and for the hard-worked preacher its as almost to exuberant suggestiveness of subjects for sermons, addresses, and exposition, sentence to upon a basis of exactly-focused Truth, will be a boon indeed. It remains the reader. now only to say a word or two to explain the analytic* form into which

* The present is not so much the age, as the triumphant reign, of analysis; all the first-class poetry, and novels, even, have been sucked so helplessly into the vortex, that they contain, or are veiled treatises of, some of the subtlest philosophy the world has yet been taught. Analysis is elaborately acted upon the stage, is rainbowed by the square acre upon the walls of palaces and in galleries in pictures, gives zest to our weekly comic literature, is the life of the Press, differentiates the oratory of the present from that of the past, and in daily converse threatens to reduce communion and friendship to logic and reciprocity. But analysis and synthesis move in correlated cycles, and so, when the loom of man's intellect is enlarged and adjusted to the magnitude of the questions of the day (which are now cosmic), out of the raw material of six thousand years past, now lying in chaotic heaps, will gradually be woven the laws, customs, politics, and Church of the millennial future. In the department of national religion, it would not be impossible to generalise, out of the past history of the Church, the alternate working of these two correlated principles. In connection with our own land, there seem to be two clearly marked instances in the post-reformation æra. (1) In the fiery analytic times of the Reformation itself was prepared the material which Elizabethan civilisation synthesised so magnificently. (2) The great searchings of heart process of the Puritan analysis was followed by the consolidating though torpid results of the Queen Anne period. To keep to that with which new translations of the Sacred Scriptures are concerned, it is certain that the Churches of the future have to be left for a coming generation to symmetrise; and, since the Creeds of the past seem, alas! too often to produce coma of heart and conscience, the oftener they are recited, we must, in this the solemn period of transition, 'do of the works that we may know of the doctrines' essential for each of us individually. Many men recite creeds for three quarters of a century only to die in the practical belief of nothing, and percontra a man may have no formulated creed that is satisfactory to himself, and yet be, as 'a law,' so a creed, 'unto himself.' So it is.

the eye of