fication, if not an entire remodelling. We are not called upon to augment the stores of English infidelity. The products of the neological school may be left, as a general thing, to perish on the ground which gave them birth. The writings of some of the principal evangelical theologians of Germany have not, by any means, all the value which their ardent admirers attributed to them on their first introduction to our community. Schleiermacher, whose life is regarded as an era in Germany, seemed to have been long struggling to attain what he might havefound by opening the pages of our Dr. Bellamy. The notions which are generally entertained on the continent of Europe in respect to the observance of the Sabbath, we should not wish to have transplanted here.

With these exceptions, however, the Germans possess mines of inestimable wealth, which ought to be opened for the benefit of the world. They are now, comparatively, unworked or unknown. The social and political circumstances of the German States are such as not to admit of the employment and diffusion of their stores of learning in a thousand ways accessible to those who speak the English tongue. A large part, however, of their biblical labors are unappreciable by us. To use a favorite term of theirs, we have not reached the point of development. We are not able to grapple with their learning, nor sympathize with their spirit. Innumerable treatises, bearing on important points in the interpretation of the Old Testament, remain solitary copies in two or three of our libraries, because English versions of them could not be sold. Some of these essays would be of essential aid to all those foreign missionaries who are called to the office of translating the Scriptures.

Moreover, it seems to be the especial duty of the scholars of this country to give to the treatises in question currency in the English tongue. The few individuals in Great Britain, who have the ability and the inclination to engage in these pursuits, are almost wholly withdrawn to the vindication of their political and ecclesiastical rights. Few results, comparatively, can be expected in that country, till the civil storms are blown over, or till the exclusive regard to what is immediately practical shall give place to juster views.

3. The importance of the study of the Hebrew language may be argued from its effect in strengthening the faith of the student in the genuineness and divine authority of the Scriptures.

The Roman Catholic binds up certain apocryphal books

with the Old Testament. But it would seem hardly possible for a reader of common discernment not to perceive instantly that the claims of these books to inspiration rest on a very precarious basis. To render this obvious, they need only to be read in connection with the canonical books. These latter have the unstudied guilelessness, the transparency, the uniform dignity of divine truth; the former may have traces of proceeding from honest and pious minds, but the dignity is not sustained; the simplicity is an imitation; they contain, not unfrequently, jejune repetitions and puerilities. Their inferiority is rendered more striking by their position. Tobit would be a respectable story if it were not crowded in between Malachi and Matthew. But placed where it is, it is brought into most unfortunate proximity with the writings whose purity, decorum and consistency indicate their higher origin. Thus our confidence in the divinity of God's word is materially strengthened. It arises in part from feeling. We cannot describe the process. Before we are aware, the perception of the difference between the two classes of writing has become a part of our consciousness.

But if such is the effect in comparing the apocryphal books with our excellent English version of the Old Testament, the contrast is much heightened by examining the former in connection with the original of the latter. The Hebrew has the signatures of a simplicity and a freshness, which no translation can fully copy, unless it be itself inspired. It is the freshness. of Eden on the seventh morning of the creation; it is the simplicity of patriarchs and prophets; it is the innocent guilelessness of angels. Our translation is faithful to the sense of the original, and it will be an everlasting monument of the powers of the English language, especially in its Anglo-Saxon features. But it is no disparagement to the version to assert, that it does not give us all the vitality and beauty of the original. In reading the latter, we cannot but feel, that we have passed into the holy of holies; the proofs of divinity are thick around us. We do not simply know that our faith in these records is firm, we feel that it is.

We may arrive at the same conclusion in another way. The translator must, in many cases, select one word, the best which he can find, to express the sense of the original word. He cannot employ amplification, paraphrase, circumlocution. He must take a single substantive, or a single epithet; else he weakens, or obscures the passage. He very properly renders

the verb by its fifth signification, to speak. He cannot even allude to the other, and more primary meanings-to arrange, to guide, to follow, and to lie in wait. He rightly translates the noun by path or road, without even hinting that it has also the meaning of act of going, journey, mode of living, conduct towards God and man, religion, destiny or the way in which it goes with any one. Thus with many other terms which might be mentioned. The sight of the original word will suggest to the reader, not simply the substantial signification of it in the passage, but all the related significations near or remote. At a single glance, he has the history of the wordnot to confuse his conceptions, but to enlarge them and render them more vivid. A single word in the translation expresses the idea of the original substantially. But to unfold the sense in the various shades of it, in the utmost perfection, the etymology of the word is, perhaps, required, or the signification is partly contained in some other ramification from the root. Thus there will be a vivid apprehension of the passage. The characters of the revelation will stand out in bolder relief. student will feel that he is no longer dealing with shadows; what he especially needs he will gain-not faith in its lower forms, but a living and enduring impression of the great realities which are couched beneath the terms which are daily coming under his eye.

The

He will, also, attain to a more intelligent conviction of the truth of some particular facts or doctrines. We may select, for instance, that of the original unity of the human race. It seems now to be fully proved, that one speech, substantially so called, pervaded a considerable portion of Europe and Asia and united in a bond of union, nations professing the most irreconcilable religions, with the most dissimilar institutions, and bearing but a slight resemblance in physiognomy and color. This language or family of languages, is the Indo-Germanic, or Indo-European. By further researches, it appears to be established, that this family is connected with the Semitic, of which the Hebrew is a dialect, not by a few verbal coincidences, but linked together, both by points of actual contact, and by the interposition of the Coptic, grounded on the essential structure and most necessary forms of the three.* In the common Hebrew Lexicon, now used in this institution, whole families of

* Dr. Wiscinan's Lectures, p. 66.

biliteral roots are illustrated by analogies from the Indo-Germanic tongues, proving that the Hebrew in its primary elements, approaches much nearer both to the European and the Southern Asiatic languages, than has been generally supposed. Every investigation in this field, and it is one of boundless extent and but just opened, increases the credibility of the Mosaic history of the creation of man, and helps to confute a standing cavil of infidelity, arising from the existing diversities in the language, color, and physical organization of our race. diligent student of the original Scriptures will be constantly meeting with unexpected and interesting discoveries, which will afford him a satisfaction akin to that felt on the solving of some long studied mathematical problem.

We have not space to illustrate the local evidence furnished by the Hebrew language, in the successive stages of its history, of the honesty of the sacred historians. When the Israelites were in Egypt, Egyptian words were incorporated with the language. There was a strong infusion of Chaldeeisms, when the people were in Babylon. Some of the later books contain words of Persian origin. Thus the language is a standing memorial of the general truth of the history.

But we hasten to consider;

4. The influence of the study of the Hebrew Scriptures on the imagination and the taste.

The imagination is not a modification of memory or of any other mental faculty. It is an original quality of the mind. It has the power of conferring additional properties upon an object, or of abstracting from it some of those which it actually possesses, and of thus enabling the object to reäct, like a new substance, upon the mind which has performed the process. It has also the power of shaping and of creating by innumerable methods. It consolidates numbers into unity and separates unity into numbers.* "It draws all things to one-makes things animate and inanimate, beings with their attributes, subjects and their accessories take one color, and serve to one effect." In its highest or creative power, the imagination belongs only to the few great poets. But the faculty is, doubtless, possessed by all men, though, in some cases, it is faintly,

* See these ideas beautifully expanded and illustrated in the Prefaces to Wordsworth's Poetry, Boston edition, 1824.

† Charles Lamb, on the Genius and Character of Hogarth, Works, Vol. II. p. 391. New York edition.

or not at all developed. Whoever can read with intelligence and sympathy a genuine poet has imagination.

"The grand storehouses of enthusiastic and meditative imagination, as distinguished from human and dramatic imagination," remarks a great living writer, " are the prophetic and lyrical parts of the Holy Scriptures, and the works of Milton, to which I cannot forbear to add those of Spenser. I select these writers in preference to those of Greece and Rome, because the anthropomorphitism of the pagan religion subjected the minds of the greatest poets in those countries too much to the bondage of form, from which the Hebrews were preserved by their abhorrence of idolatry. This abhorrence was almost as strong in our great epic poet, both from the circumstances of his life, and from the constitution of his mind. However imbued the surface might be with classical literature, he was a Hebrew in soul, and all things in him tended towards the sublime."

The poetry of the Hebrews is sometimes represented as oriental, an eastern fashion, local, factitious, artificial, adapted to men living a migratory life, under an ardent sky, and not adapted to a severe European taste. But the Hebrew poetry is no such thing. It is European; it is occidental, for all ages and generations; it is universal in its character; it is everlasting as the affections of man. It furnishes food for that imagination, whose birth was not for time but for all eternity. Peasants can feel its force; philosophers kindle at its inspiration. Strip the Old Testament of its poetry, and it is not the old Testament; it contains truth, but not the truth which God revealed. Take out of it the element of imagination, that which makes it poetry, and the residue is neither poetry nor prose. It may be truth, but it is not the truth which we need. No error can be greater than to call the Hebrew poetry mere costume. There are some truths which are poetry in their very nature. Men, the world over, have imagination and love poetic truths, and these truths were necessary for them, and, therefore, part of the Bible is poetry.

The Arab praises the Koran because it contains lofty, poetic conceptions of the Deity; but these are the very things which Mohammed stole from the Jewish Scriptures.

It has been, sometimes, a matter of wonder how the poet Dante, rising up when the human mind was at its nadir, alone, in the night of the dark ages, in Italy, in the confluence, as it were, of the two streams of corruption and death, in the midst.