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of a different type. Even Professor Hug* admits the difference, though he is content to ascribe it to the effects of the course of education to which the Apostle had been subjected.

"Having been (we quote the Professor) for a long time led about from one tribunal to another, and having been obliged to be his own advocate and speaker, he perfected himself in a fluency which was ready to be applied to the first occasion." (Supplement, section 142.) And again: "The more I become acquainted with the writings of the Apostle, the more am I tempted to account the Epistle to the Hebrews as his masterpiece. It bears the seal of perfection, just as those to the Thessalonians denote the commencement of his career as an author." (Ib. section 143.)

The Greek cannot be from S. Paul's hand. Are we to say that it is a translation from a Hebrew original? Clement of Alexandria thought that it was; but Origen had sound reasons for abandoning his master's opinion. We venture to think that it is almost as evident that the Greek is no translation, as that the Greek is not S. Paul's own. Much stress has generally been laid on the apparent use of the Septuagint by the original author; but, although this argument is not without weight, it is yet by no means so conclusive as many have wished to consider it. It is argued that the very point of difference between the Hebrew and the Septuagint enters more than once into the argument itself, so that to abandon the reading is to destroy the reasoning. If this were accurately true, it would be almost conclusive as to the language in which the Epistle was written; for it is not likely that the writer would desert the original Hebrew and conform to the LXX., if he were writing the letter in Hebrew.

But, on examining the passages adduced as examples (especially x. 5-10 and 38, 39), it will be found that, though the LXX. reading seems to improve the force of the passage, it is yet by no means essential to the logical inference. A proof, however, which by itself does not suffice, may often help to build up a conclusive argument; and if the manner in which the quotations from the LXX. are handled in this Epistle does not absolutely prove that the original language was Greek, it is at least a valuable confirmation of other proofs, which are not wanting.

Many of the peculiarities of style which make this Epistle so unlike the other thirteen of S. Paul, seem also to declare that it is no translation. The Greek is too elegant, the rounding of the periods is too graceful; the flow of the sentences is too natural to suggest to any mind that it is a reproduction from a widely

* An Introduction to the Writings of the New Testament, by Dr. John Leonard Hug. Translated by the Rev. Daniel Guildford Wait, LL.D.

London. 1827.

VOL. XV.—NO. XXIX. [New Series.]

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different idiom. Then, again, there are many long compound words whch exactly suit the genius of the Greek, and seem to be the direct exponents of original compound thoughts, but which we can hardly bring ourselves to regard as ingenious condensations of much longer and more unwieldy expressions in the original. Some of these beautiful inventions of a mind deeply Grecian in its literary habits could not be rendered in any other language without heartrending circumlocution; and if that other language were the stiff and uncompromising, though strong and beautiful, Hebrew, in which, for mere want of adjectives, very simple ideas often require to be eked out with a combination of substantives, we may be allowed to believe that the task of retranslation would have been too severe for even holy David's unassisted powers. If the Epistle be indeed a translation from Hebrew into Greek, it is one in which the translator has had large license to modify and invent; and if the limits of what is meant by translation be indefinitely stretched till they admit the freest paraphrase of the thoughts of another, then Clement of Alexandria's opinion may be explained away till it coincides with Origen's.

But now, if the Greek of this Epistle is neither a translation in any strict sense of the word, nor the writing of S. Paul, we must admit one of two things-either that S. Paul was not the author or that it is possible to effect a divorce between the author and the writer. If we take the latter course, we have Cornelius a Lapide against us.

Some (he says), including Origen and Clement of Alexandria,* quoted above, make answer that it was written in Greek, after such a manner that the ideas and the subject matter belong to Paul, but the wording and the composition to S. Luke, or to Clement, and that for this reason it is more elegant than the other epistles of Paul. In this case, however, Paul would not be the author and sacred writer of this epistle, but much rather Luke, or Clement, the man, in fact, who wrote down and put in order the various ideas, not by his own caprice, but by the inspiration of God, and under the dictation of the Holy Ghost.

A Lapide in this remark forgets himself. To say that the actual writer, the framer of the words and sentences, has the best right to be considered the author, is to make the raiment more than the body, or the body more than the soul. When we pass from the words, and the syntax, and the flow of language, to the examination of the thoughts and the arguments, and the treatment of the subject, we find S. Paul and the spirit of S. Paul living and moving in every verse. There is only one Paul, in his

*This is a slip of the pen. Indeed, A Lapide contradicts it in the very next paragraph.

intense individuality, in the Church of God; but there must needs have been two Pauls if any other than the Doctor of the Gentiles conceived the Epistle to the Hebrews. Either S. Paul or his "alter ego" gave existence to the letter; but that "alter ego never trod this earth.

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Difficulties seem to hem our subject round. If we are to go by first appearances, and to form our judgment from externals, we shall say that the Epistle to the Hebrews is from any other hand than S. Paul's; but, whilst we are thus avoiding one difficulty, and shrinking in despair from the attempt to reconcile discordant language and divergent style, we find that we are only entangling ourselves more inextricably still in the meshes of a more unmanageable net. S. Paul did not think in the same groove as other men and to read a letter which is made up of his thoughts, all arranged after his own way of thinking, and deny his authorship, is something like denying the Creator in His own creation, only because His name is not written in gold upon the azure sky.

At the Robber-Council of Ephesus the Eutychians cried out in their gentle and conciliatory way: Who cleaveth Christ, cleave him in twain! Cursed be he that severeth !* They were lamentably wrong in their notions of what was and what was not divisible; but he who divides what is really indivisible deserves the anathema of sensible men. Therefere we will not divide S. Paul from himself as long as there is an alternative left us.

We are free to assert that the Greek as we have it is the original text; that it is not from the hand of S. Paul, nor yet a translation from the Hebrew of S. Paul; and that for all that S. Paul is verily the author of the Epistle. With all deference to A Lapide, his judgment must be set aside in this matter. Without diving into the lowest depths of the doctrine of inspiration, or committing ourselves to any theory, it is enough to know that the Church by no means insists upon strict verbal inspiration of Holy Scripture, but lends her entire approval to theologians who uphold the "formal inspiration," accompanied by the "material assistance," of the Holy Ghost: who maintain, in other words, that the substance of what is said is Divine, but that the manner of saying it is left to the discretion of the inspired writer. He must be preserved from the possibility of error in the thing revealed, but he is free to adopt these words or those, this form of sentence or that, one figure of speech or another, even Anacoluthon included. The gift of inspiration does not necessarily involve high literary excellence; and, indeed, if it did, it could not stop short of the very highest perfection; and not only should we find, as now, a beauti

τὸν λέγοντα δύο φύσεις εἰς δύο τέμνε, ἀνάθεμα τῷ διαιροῦντι. (Labbe, t. 4, pp. 917, 918.)

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ful admixture of sublime and simple, but the more we scrutinized each word and phrase, the more we should discover that the matchless beauty of the whole was due to the faultless, though varied, beauty of each several part, and there would certainly be no room. for the modest excuses which close the Second Book of Machabees: "Which if I have done well, and as it becometh the history, it is what I desired but if not so perfectly, it must be pardoned me." If, then, S. Paul, either for want of leisure time, or simply because he wished to present his ideas clothed in more classic Greek, had taken one of his companions, a man deeply imbued with Christian doctrine, familiar with the Apostle's habit of mind, and train of thought, and method of reasoning, and had deputed him to draw up a little treatise in his most telling Greek, sketching out the kind of thing wanted, the divisions of the subject, the run of the argument, the various proofs, the plan of attack and defence, the tone of the address, the mode of blending all together, the arrangement and proportion of exhortation and instruction, the transition from dogmatic principles to practical application, with other items of detail; and if, after the skilful amanuensis had reduced these spoken hints into written Greek (wσTEρεì oxoλιογραφήσας τὰ εἰρημένα τοῦ διδασκάλου), S. Paul 'carefully examined the work, revised and corrected it, retrenching, or expanding, or improving when he met anything that was not exactly what his inspiration recognized as its own legitimate expression, and if, after assuring himself that it was a faithful embodiment of what he had in his own mind, he formally adopted and endorsed it, and sent it out under the sanction of his authority, who shall tell us that Barnabas, or Luke, or Silas, or Clement had better right than Paul to be considered the author of that Epistle? S. Paul might have helped the writer in all the ways above specified, and the difficulty of supposing him to have taken so much trouble, and to have descended so scrupulously into detail, would be far less than the difficulties which have to be solved by those who say that S. Paul wrote the actual Greek, or by those who deny that S. Paul had anything at all to do with the letter.

Still, it is not necessary to suppose that S. Paul did quite everything that has been enumerated. He may have done considerably less, and still have been deservedly considered the author; for even so the matter is S. Paul's, the manner belongs to some one else. The words may be Luke's or Clement's, but the thoughts are the thoughts of Paul beyond the power of rhetoric to hide them. The soul is there and the body is there-it is but the garb which is changed.

This is the solution of the question given by Estius, and by Origen too, whatever Dean Alford may think. It seems complete and satisfactory, and reconciles the contending difficulties arising

from the contradictory character of the spirit and the letter in this Epistle to the Hebrews,-difficulties which seem incapable of simultaneous solution, because just in proportion as the one grows less the other gains importance, and to answer the one is to declare the other unanswerable. These difficulties now only do not vanish, because they have literally no existence. The language and the argument of the Epistle cease to be at variance the moment we are permitted to ascribe the one to S. Paul, without ascribing to him the other also. The Council of Trent tells us that S. Paul is the author. The author, in some true sense, S. Paul must be: this is, for us at least, out of the reach of dispute. We could not deny it if we wished; but no argument has been yet put forward that need distantly tempt us to deny it; and the deeper the insight we obtain by study into the inner meaning and spirit of the Epistle, the more our human judgment bears out the divinely assisted judgment of the Church, and forces upon us the conviction that S. Paul had the largest part in the production of the said Epistle. On the other hand, critics and scholars agree that the Greek is not S. Paul's, and is not a translation. There is one way out of the difficulty easy, satisfactory, and orthodoxτὰ μὲν νοήματα τοῦ ̓Αποστόλου ἐστίν. “If I were to give my opinion," says Origen once again, "I should say that the thoughts are the Apostle's, but that the wording and construction are the work of some one else."

ART. IV.-MEMOIRS OF MADAME DE LAFAYETTE AND MADAME DE MONTAGU.

Vie de Madame de Lafayette. Par Madame de LASTEYRIE, sa fille, et précédée d'une Notice sur la Mère Madame la Duchesse d'Ayen, 1737-1807. Paris: Léon Techener Fils.

Anne Paule Dominique de Noailles, Marquise de Montagu. Quatrième édition. Paris: Dentu.

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NOTICEABLE reaction in the way of sympathy has taken branch of the Bourbons, and the faithful adherents who suffered for and with them in the terrible days of the First Revolution, a sympathy which is, we believe, unconnected with political hopes or plans, and which is felt by many who are content to

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