1

Virgin rejoice in the dance."* "The Lord hath trodden the Virgin, the daughter of Judah, as in a wine-press."+ And Isaiah himself uses this expression respecting a foreign city: "Thou shalt no more rejoice, O thou oppressed Virgin, daughter of Sidon." And expressing to the invader Sennacherib, the contempt which God authorised Jerusalem to entertain for his threats, he says, "The Virgin, the daughter of Zion, hath despised thee and laughed thee to scorn."§ It should be remembered, however, that the establishment of this interpretation is by

no means necessary to the proof of invalidity in

the Trinitarian application of the prophecy. The reasons which I have adduced, together with the use in a neighbouring passage, of

the phrase

over the breadth of thy land, O Immanuel," appear to me to point out some prince as the Virgin's Son. But many eminent interpreters consider him as only one of the Prophet's own

children,

in Israel."

whom the Lord had given him, for signs and for wonders

And the first four verses of the next chapter certainly son in a manner so strikingly similar, as to give a

speak of Isaiah's

strong support to this interpretation. But whatever obscurity there may be in the passage, the one clear certainty in it is this: that it does not refer to any person to be born seven or eight hundred years after the delivery of the prediction. And it is surely unworthy of any educated Theologian, possessing a full knowledge of the embarrassments attending the Trinitarian appeal to such texts, still to reiterate that appeal, without any specification of the mode in which De

the primary object of the prophecy? Or will any one be found deliberately to defend the hypothesis of a double sense? Or must we fear, that a lax and unscrupulous use is often made of allusions which sound well in the popular ear, without any distinct estimate of their real argumentative value?

It is no doubt convenient to cut the knot of every difficulty by the appeal to inspiration; to say, e. g., that Matthew applies the word Emmanuel to Christ, and with a correctness which his infallibility forbids us to impeach. But are our opponents prepared to abide by this rule, to prove its truth, to apply it, without qualification, to the New Testament citations from the Hebrew Scriptures? Will they, for instance, find and expound, for the benefit of the church, the prophecy stated by Matthew to have been fulfilled in Jesus,

"He

Jer. xxxi, 13. §2 Kings xix. 21.

+ Lam. i. 15. || Is. viii. 8.

Is. xxiii. 12. ¶ Is. viii. 18.

shall be called a Nazarene ?"* The words are declared to have been "spoken by the prophets." But they are not discoverable in any of the canonical prophesies: so that either the Evangelist took them from some inspired work now lost,-in which case the canon is imperfect, and Christianity is deprived of the benefit of certain predictions intended for its support; or, he has cited them so incorrectly from our existing Scriptures, that the quotation cannot be identified. I cannot refrain from expressing my amazement, that those, whose constant duty it is to expound the New Testament writings should be conscious of no danger to their authority, when it is strained so far as to include an infallible interpretation of the Older Scriptures.

D.

On Isaiah ix. 6.

The translation of this passage is not unattended with difficulties: and many of the versions which learned men have proposed leave nothing on which the Trinitarian argument can rest. It is clear that divines ought to establish the meaning of the verse, before they reason from its theology. I subjoin a few of the most remarkable translations.

The Septuagint; "And his name shall be called Messenger of a great counsel;' for I will bring peace upon the rulers, and health to him."

The Targum of Jonathan; "And by the Wonderful in counsel, by the Mighty God who endureth for ever, his name shall be called the Messiah (the anointed), in whose days peace shall be multiplied upon us." The following allusion to the titles in this passage from Talmud Sanhedrim, 11 ch., will show to whom they were applied by Jewish commentators : "God said, let Hezekiah, who has five names, take vengeance on the king of Assyria, who has taken on himself five names also."

Grotius ; ""

Wonderful; Counsellor of the Mighty God; Father of the future age; Prince of Peace."

Editor of Calmet ;

Admirable, Counsellor, Divine Interpreter,

Mighty, Father of Future time, Prince of Peace."

Bishop Lowth; "Wonderful, Counsellor, the Mighty God, the

Father of the everlasting age, the Prince of Peace."

Many other translations might be added and even if the pro

• Matt. ii. 23.

phecy were not obviously spoken of Hezekiah, we might reasonably ask, what doctrinal certainty can be found in so uncertain an announcement? And how is the fact accounted for that, important as it was to the apostles' success to make the largest possible use of their ancient scriptures, not one of them ever alludes to this pre

diction?

E.

On the Proem of John.

A real

The objection which is most commonly entertained to the foregoing interpretation of the Proem of St. John's Gospel, arises from the strength and vividness of the personification of the Logos. personality it is said, must be assumed, in order to satisfy the terms of the description, which could never have been applied by the

apostle to a mere mental creation.

I am by

I think it of less weight than the difficulties which beset every other explanation. And it appears to be greatly relieved by two considerations; first, that a considerable part of the difficulty arises from

no means insensible to the force of this objection: though

want of

a

correspondence between the Greek and the English usage of

an

language; secondly, that this personification did not originate with the apostle, but had become, by slow and definable gradations, established formula of speech.

1. The first of these considerations I will introduce to my readers in the words of Archbishop Whately: "Our language possesses one remarkable advantage, with a view to this kind of Energy, in the constitution of its genders. All nouns in English, which express objects that are really neuter, are considered as strictly of the neuter gender; the Greek and Latin, though possessing the advantage (which is wanting in the languages derived from them) of having a neuter gender, yet lose the benefit of it, by fixing the masculine or feminine genders upon many nouns denoting things inanimate; whereas in English, when we speak of any such object in the masculine or feminine gender, that form of expression at once confers personality upon it. When Virtue,' e. g. or our Country' are spoken of as females, or Ocean' as a male, &c., they are, by that very circumstance, personified; and a stimulus is thus given to the imagination, from the very circumstance that in calm discussion or description, all of these would be neuter; whereas in Greek or Latin, as in French or Italian, no such distinction could be made. The

employment of' Virtus,' and 'Aperǹ in the feminine gender, can contribute, accordingly, no animation to the style, when they could not, without a solecism, be employed otherwise." *

Now let any one read the English Proem of John, and ask himself, how much of the appearance of personality is due to the occurrence, again and again, of the pronouns he," him," "his," applied to the Logos; let him remember that this much is a mere imposition practised unavoidably upon him by the idiom of our language, and " gives no animation to the style" in the original; and I am persuaded that the violence of the personification will be tamed down to the apprehension of a very moderate imagination. It is true that the Logos does not, by this allowance, become impersonal; other parts of the personal conception remain, in the acts of creation and of illumination, attributed to this Divine Power: and hence the substitution of the neuter pronouns "it" and "its;" for the masculines "he," "him," "his," though useful, provisionally, for shaking off the English illusion to which I have referred, cannot be allowed to represent the sentiment of the passage faithfully.

There appears to be another peculiarity of our language and modes of thought, as contrasted with the Greek, which exaggerates, in the Common Translation, the force of the personification. The English language leaves to an author a free choice of either gender for his personifications: and the practical effect of this has been, that the feminine prosopopeia has been selected as most appropriate to abstract qualities and attributes of the mind; and although instances are not wanting of masculine representations of several of the human passions, the figure is felt, in such cases, to be much more vehement and more entirely beyond the limits of prose, than the employment of the other gender. What imagination would naturally think of Pity, of Fear, of Joy, of Genius, of Hope, as male beings? It may be doubted whether our most imaginative prose writers present any example of a male personification of an attribute: I can call to mind instances in the writings of Milton and Jeremy Taylor, of this figure so applied to certain material objects, as the Sun, the Ocean, but not to abstract qualities or modes, unless when a conception is borrowed (as of "Old Time”) from the ancient mythology. And accordingly, to an English reader, such a style of representation must always appear forced and strange. But a writer in a language like the Greek

Elements of Rhetoric, part iii. ch. ii. § 3.

cannot choose the sex of his personifications; it is decided for him, by the gender already assigned to the abstraction, about which he is occupied; and both he and his readers must accommodate their conceptions to this idiomatic necessity. In the German, the Moon is masculine; the Sun feminine; and every reader of that language knows the strange incongruities which, to English perceptions, this peculiarity introduces into its poetical imagery. For example, there is a German translation of Mrs. Barbauld's Hymns in prose; a passage of which, rendered literally into English would read I will show you what is glorious. The Sun is glorious. When She shineth in the clear sky, when She sitteth on the bright throne in the heavens, and looketh abroad over all the earth, She is the most excellent and glorious creature the eye can behold. The Sun is glorious; but He that made the Sun is more glorious than She.” "There is the Moon, bending His bright horns, like a silver

thus:

Again;

bow, and shedding His mild light, like liquid silver, over the blue firmament." In the Greek literature, accordingly, the masculine personification of abstractions is as easy and common as the feminine; and the former occurs in many instances in which an English author, having free choice, would prefer the latter: thus in Homer, Fear is a

son of Mars:

Οἷος δὲ βροτολοιγὸς Αρης πόλεμόνδε μέτεισι,

Τῷ δὲ φόβος, φίλος υἱὸς, ἅμα κρατερὸς καὶ ἀταρβὴς,

Εσπετο.

But in Collins, a nymph :

"O Fear!.

Thou who such weary lengths hast past,
Where wilt thou rest, mad nymph! at last?" †

And so in Coleridge:

"Black Horror screamed, and all her goblin rout
Diminish'd shrunk from the more withering scene." ↑

Pindar must make Envy a masculine power :

Μὴ βαλέτω με λίθῳ τραχεῖ φθόνος.”

Coleridge describes thus the same feeling, giving itself speech:

"But-- "First hear his band, its kill to the "