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LIFE.

"What is the gift of Life ?"

Speak thou, in young existence revelling-
To thee it is a glorious god-like thing:
Love, Hope and Fancy lead the joyous way,
Ambition kindles up her living ray,

There is a path of light mark'd out for thee,
A thornless path, and there thy way shall be;
A thousand spirits by thy side shall fall,
But thou shalt live, and look beyond them all,—
Yes, Life indeed may seem a joyous thing.

"What is the gift of Life"

To thee, subdued and taught by wisdom's voice,
Wisdom of stern necessity, not choice?
Whose cup of joy is ebbing out in haste,
Who hast no fountain to supply the waste,
Whose spirit, like some traveller gazing round
On broken columns in the desert ground,
Sees but sad traces, on a lonely scene,

Of what life was, and what it might have been,-
O is not Life a sad and solemn thing?

"What is the gift of Life,"

To him who reads with Heav'n-instructed eye?
'Tis the first dawning of Eternity-

The future Heav'n just breaking on the sight,
The glimmering of a still increasing light;-
Its cheering scenes, foretastes of heav'nly joy,
Its storms and tempests, sent to purify ;-

O is not Life a bright, inspiring thing?

"What is the gift of Life,"

To him whose soul through this tumultuous road
Hath past, and found its home, its Heav'n, its God?
Who sees the boundless page of knowledge spread,
And years as boundless rolling o'er his head;
No cloud to darken the celestial light,
No sin to sully, and no grief to blight;-
Is not that better life a glorious thing?

E..

of Christianity, and I believe him to be a believer in it upon the deepest conviction, and after a most accurate examination of the subject. He has studied the Scriptures long and critically, and is, I believe, truly pious and devout, though he attends no place of public worship when here. He is a strenuous Unitarian, and told me not long since that the Creeds and the Litany are what keep him from Church: what keeps him from the places where those are absent I know not. Not long since he told me merrily, that if he dies in this country he will appoint me executor and administrator of his papers, to be disposed of at my discretion: these, he says, will fill a cart chest. He has no children besides the physician mentioned above; but he has a family of eight young children.'

OBSERVATIONS ON THE CONTROVERSY AS TO THE ORIGINAL LANGUAGE OF THE BOOKS OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.

(Continued from p. 17.)

THE author of Palæoromaica, in his first disquisition, examines the opinion, that a knowledge of the Greek language was general and almost universal in the age of the apostles, an opinion which, he submits, he proves to be at once contrary to probability and to facts. Now a great deal of this argument, in which the author discusses at some length the opinions of Walpole and Dr. Falconer, has really very little to do with the main question. Indeed we may say that it has none at all, except as it bears on the argument of antecedent probability, which, as Dr. Maltby observes, after all "must partly at least be founded in a species of à priori reasoning against a supposed historical fact." It is not, perhaps, so completely open to the objection as Hardouin's second position was; but the latter has, on the other hand, the advantage of being a much more cautious and proveable proposition than that of his disciple.

In the second and third disquisitions, the author submits on somewhat the same line of argument, that, considering that at least one of the Gospels and several of St. Paul's Epistles (including, as the strongest point, the Epistles to the Corinthians, on the same ground as Hardouin had put it) were addressed to Latins, it might have been expected that these portions, at least, of the New Testament should have been sent to them rather in Latin than Greek. He further argues that our Elzevir* text bears marks of being a version from the Latin, and that it is not improbable that a translated or retranslated text may have supplanted the original; the author not himself determining the question in all cases whether the lost Latin, from which the present Greek text is a supposed translation, was the immediate original, or only itself a version from a lost Greek original. The interesting part of this disquisition consists in an inquiry, well worthy of close investigation, into the striking peculiarities of the Apostle Paul. To support, however, the author's argament, that the existing Greek of the Apostle's Epistles cannot be his original text, because he must have been a man of learning and therefore able to write purer Greek than these Epistles exhibit, rests on the assumption of a great deal to which it is very difficult to allow any probability, in the face of universal testimony and tradition to the authenticity of his writings. No reasonable allowance for defects in translation would, moreover, in any way account for or bear the blame of the main peculiarities of the Apostle's style, though they might be the occasion of some of the present anomalous words used in the Greek text.

The fourth disquisition proceeds to support the author's theory by a list of words, phrases, &c.; all, as he contends, tending to establish that what is called the Hellenistic style is not Hebrew but Latin-Greek, and to prove the conclusion which he draws, that our present text is derived from the Latin. In doing this, he is obliged to deal the same measure, for like reasons, to the existing Greek versions of the Old Testament, as well as to all the remains

By this of course he means all the existing Greek texts and MSS., though he chooses throughout (except in a short note) to adopt rather an absurd system of reference to and impeachment of this edition only; a plan which answers no other end than to give a needless appearance of evasion and disingenuousness to a book otherwise sufficiently open and straight-forward.

of the apostolic age and the Apocryphal books, and he thereby of course proportionably increases his difficulty of accounting for the total disappearance of all this mass of original Latin literature. His remarks on these heads, however, contain a fund of highly curious and interesting matter, proving, no doubt, as might naturally be expected under such circumstances, that a great deal of Latinism exists in the corrupt and compounded Greek dialect then in use. But he is by no means so satisfactory in his opposition to the theory (which has probably been pushed too far) of the Hebraic or Syriac preponderance in this corruption, as he might have been, if he were acquainted, as it seems he is not, with those languages whose traces he is so anxious to disprove; being, perhaps, under such circumstances, not very likely to discover them. It is one thing, too, to prove that a man writes either Latinized or Hebraistic Greek, and another to prove that he did not, in fact, write the Greek at all, but that what we suppose to be his work is a translation from a Latin or Hebrew original. When an author like Eusebius, living comparatively so near to the period of the writers of these books, and speaking from his birth the same language, does not perceive the circumstances of supposed mistake and confusion, which (if they be well founded and obvious to a stranger in the nineteenth century) must have been manifest to a Greek, in a hundred-fold degree; when every peculiarity in their style is considered by such a man as accurately described and accounted for by the mere phrase of την δε γλωτταν ιδιωτεύοντες, it requires a body of proof, strong indeed, to raise even a probable supposition that the peculiarities of style in the books of the New Testament require any such explanation as our author imagines.

The fifth disquisition strives, with much unsuccessful labour, at obviating a very important difficulty in the hypothesis, namely, how these Greek translations so completely got the better of the Latin originals; -how the influence of Roman literature declined, as Christianity spread in a western direction, so as to come more and more within its sphere;-how Latin theology slept till the days of Tertullian;-and how, when the canon was formed, a general proscription of the Latin originals was proposed, resolved, and successfully executed. In this part of the work, by the way, are some important practical observations, which it would be well if critics, in discussing questions relative to the general state and diffusion of the books of the New Testament during the two or three first centuries, would always bear in mind. They relate to a common mistake of viewing and talking of these writings in the early times of Christianity in the same way as they would do under our present advantages of having them printed, bound up in a volume, and present in every house. Dr. Horsley tells Dr. Priestley, "that the principles of the Christian religion were to be collected neither from a single Gospel, nor from the four Gospels; nor from the four Gospels with the Acts and the Epistles; but from the whole code of revelation, consisting of the canonical books of the Old and New Testament." The author before us very properly observes, that "in this case the principles of the Christian religion could scarcely have been collected till after the invention of printing." We nay add, that even some of the peculiar seats of learning, nearly a thousand years afterwards, seem, from the old catalogues preserved of their libraries, to have possessed only portions of the sacred books. But this observation rather militates against, than in any way supports, the author's hypothesis; for it is obvious, that the dispersion and individuality of each book would render a general concurrence in the desertion and destruction of the originals

VOL. I.

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vastly more improbable. This disquisition concludes with a strange and hardly serious detail of the supposed concurrence of preceding editors of the New Testament, in the basis of the hypothesis. This concurrence the author deduces from the authority which they ascribe to the existing Latin versions; not to his own supposed original, (which he admits to be lost, for he gives up that part of Hardouin's dream which sees it in the Vulgate,) but to versions obviously formed from the Greek. That a version, say even of the eighth century, formed, we will suppose with care, from MSS. then probably very ancient, should often be considered of as much, perhaps more, weight than an older MS. of the original language, say of the sixth, which may be a mere transcript by an ignorant hand, is by no means an irrational conclusion. The former may bring the testimony of a faithful witness on an examination of documents now lost, but which were very likely of more value and antiquity than those which remain to us; and that testimony besides is often free from the suspicion that tricks have been played with it for party purposes, which we know to have been the case with the Greek text after the disputes between contending sects had arisen. From these tricks a version might have a better chance of escaping. But what has this to do with any admission or assumption of the theory of a previously existing, but now lost, Latin original, from which the text of these Greek MSS. was formed? And to what more would the argument drawn from the Latinizing of old Greek MSS. amount, supposing the fact to be clear, than to prove this sort of reliance on the part of their writers on the evidence of old versions in doubtful cases? It amounts to nothing more, unless, indeed, it could be shewn, that there were in fact no such versions in existence anterior to the date of those Greek MSS. At any rate, the Latinizing of early Greek MSS. would necessarily prove only this, that both they and the Latin versions draw their authority from some common original; and it may be added, that this agreement of ancient Greek MSS. with versions, is not peculiar to those in the Latin language, but exists in a similar way with regard to those in other tongues, such as the Syriac and the Coptic.

In the sixth disquisition the author makes an attempt in which one can hardly suppose he means to place any reliance, and which, if he does, throws more discredit on his judgment than any other portion of his hypothesis. He endeavours to support his theory by forcing it to elucidate the system of the most eminent foreign biblical critics as to the different families of recensiones of MSS. For this purpose, he relies on Griesbach's description of certain classes or recensiones (we might better say, editions) of MSS. as exhibiting "textum toto suo habitû, universoque colore diversum." This he chooses to twist into an expression of that sort of difference which two independent translations from a given original would exhibit. Here, he argues, is a proof of a common Latin original, or at least of a Latin version more ancient than the present various Greek texts, which are, he contends, separate and distinct versions. There is much that is instructive, much that is, at all events, highly interesting, in the Palæoromaica, as opening new topics of important inquiry; but the author can hardly suppose that such speculations as those which we have last adverted to, would either redound to his personal credit for judgment, or propitiate public attention to the graver arguments in favour of his hypothesis. In reality, the circumstance of there being even in Jerome's time many distinct Latin versions, and substantially only one Greek text, seems decisive against the notion that the latter is the result of translation. For if so, why should it not be found existing in as

distinct and evident forms of individuality as Jerome found the Latin versions? Why should the Christian world be supposed to have unanimously agreed in one Greek version, when they had innumerable Latin ones?

The author subsequently published a supplement to his work, in which he briefly replied to the remarks of some opponents, in the persons of the active Bishop of St. David's, of an able Reviewer in the British Critic, and of Mr. Conybeare, the late Prebendary of York. They have all borne testimony to his talents and originality, and, if such be the extent of his ambition, they appear very willing to concede to him that degree of praise which is implied in Lardner's remark, that "to readers of a superior order, it is not of the first importance whether an author supports a right or a wrong opinion, if he collects together the materials on which a judgment can be exercised, because such persons will form their own notions on the statements that are submitted to them." He has made his book a storehouse, for instance, of curious quotations, and is at least entitled to the merit, if it be one, of having given us some very plausible reasons why we might have been inclined to suspect some things to have happened in one way, if we could shut our eyes to overwhelming conviction, that, in point of fact, they happened in quite another. The main position, and one certainly which deserves a thorough investigation, is that which has at present been least minutely considered by his opponents, we mean the argument drawn from supposed mistranslations of Latin words or phrases. The author has coupled his theory with an avowed recognition, nevertheless, of the authenticity of the books of the New Testament in some text or another. For this purpose he has been obliged, as we have seen, to have recourse to some extraordinary and highly improbable assumptions, in which it is very likely that many of his readers will not follow him; and it would have been as well, therefore, to have explained how he meant to obviate the consequences which he can hardly be ignorant have been drawn from the admission of his principal position, as to a lurking Latin original, coupled with a rejection of the rest of his hypothesis. He must, we should think, be aware that this principal position has been maintained, though not publicly advocated, by at least one eminent scholar; who used it as proof, not that the inspired Jewish teachers wrote Latin, and that this Latin has disappeared every where from the face of the earth, with the other improbabilities attendant upon our author's hypothesis; but that the writings which bear their names are spurious, and a mere Roman fabrication, transferred into the Greek language by clumsy hands. It is impossible not to see that this would be a conclusion likely to occur to some whom the main argument might convince, while the accompanying assumptions startled them by their gross improbability; and if a solution so hostile to the truth of Christianity itself be really far from his thoughts, we repeat, that it would have been better to have stated and met the difficulty which would thus stand in the way of his hypothesis.

In what we have said of the book before us, we must remind the reader that our object has been to state the progress of the controversy rather historically than critically. We cannot pretend to have done any thing like critical justice to such a book as the Palæoromaica. Its merits consist rather in the mode and details of its execution, than in the results of its arguments, and a bare skeleton can therefore do it little justice. As it is, however, we have taken up so much space, that we must defer to another Number a few remarks on Dr. Maltby's Sermon, which we are happy to see he announces as "part of a series designed to illustrate the original languages of Scripture, particularly the Hellenistic Greek."

8.

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