perfected, a new, even a heavenly scene for the perfect life of man, now perfected in soul and body and environment. The life to which we look is not a life of the senses but a life of spiritual realities, a life in a higher sphere, a life in consummated fellowship with Christ. Christ said of himself (John 16. 28), “I came out from the Father, and am come into the world: again, I leave the world, and go unto the Father." To this higher state of existence, from which he came and to which he has returned, he promises to bring his people:

I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I come again, and will receive you unto myself: that where I am, there ye may be also (John 14. 2, 3).

Father, that which thou hast given me, I will that, where I am, they also may be with me; that they may behold my glory, which thou hast given me; for thou lovedst me before the foundation of the world (John 17. 24).

Time would fail to refer to the various beautiful and inspiring representations of the life of the consummated kingdom: that activity which is eternal rest, that service which is perfect liberty, that unclouded vision of God wherein the highest experiences and aspirations of the present find their culmination and fulfillment, that perfect, blessed relation to God wherein the creative design is realized. “All things are of him, and through him, and unto him" (Rom. 11. 36). And we who have so long stumbled and sinned and suffered, "we shall be like him when we shall see him as he is" (1 John 3. 3); he shall be "the firstborn among many brethren" (Rom. 8. 29).

At last, at last, God's love in creation shall be completed in the redemption of the purchased possession, and over against God, the perfect and the good, shall stand a world such as he designed, perfectly receptive to his grace, perfectly responsive to his love-in Dorner's noble phrase, "the counter-chime of God."

F.#. Mallace

ART. II.-THE SUGGESTION OF A NEW METHOD IN BIBLE INTERPRETATION

eous.

"THINK twice before you speak-and then talk to yourself" may be a very prudent motto for those to follow who imagine that they have something new to say theologically; but it is unrightIt is opposed to the orthodoxy of conscience. The gospel of the silent tongue is a heresy of cowardice. If anyone supposes himself to have discovered some new principle or some new method of Bible study which seems to relieve difficulties and throw light upon passages previously hard to understand he proves himself a heretic to duty, and fit comrade of Bishop Blougram, that superstitious sophist, of whom Browning writes, if for reasons "prudent" he thinks twice and then talks to himself. Such is our defense for offering to the REVIEW the following brief outline of what seems a practically new and very fruitful method of Bible exegesis.

1. The fundamental principle upon which this system of interpretation is based is old. Everyone accepts it in theory. No interpreter of ancient documents questions its soundness. Yet, strange as it may seem, no commentator or apologete has thus far grasped it, and applied it consistently as a scientific principle in the interpretation of the biblical writings. If it had been used even as a working hypothesis by recent writers various "defenses of orthodoxy," such, for example, as Capron's Conflict of Truth, could never have been written, while on the other hand some critical scholars-such as Driver, Gunkel, etc.,-would have refrained from charging upon the Bible many of the contradictions and mistakes of which they think these ancient writers were guilty. What is the basal principle underlying the correct interpretation of all ancient documents? That the language used, words, phrases, and symbols, must be understood and interpreted in the sense which these bore at the time the document appeared among the people by whom or to whom such document was written. No Orientalist questions the soundness of this principle. No creditable Bible scholar questions it. Yet it is only very recently

that this most important critical principle could be applied to the Bible literature. It is only in our generation that the writings of the ancient world have been recovered and the opportunity afforded to examine the vocabulary and literary style, the metaphors and symbols used by the neighbors of the Hebrews at the time the Hebrew Scriptures were being written. A bulk of material a thousand times larger than that of the Old Testament and tons of papyri dating from the pre-christian and early Christian eras have been unexpectedly brought to light in the last few years. Such discoveries have done for the ancient world what the application of electricity has done for our modern cities. Such a new and brilliant light has been thrown upon the thought, literature, and civilization of that far away past that it has necessitated a thorough revision of the Hebrew and Greek grammars and lexicons, and an entire rewriting of all ancient history. It is now absolutely proved that ancient Israel was not isolated, geographically, linguistically, or religiously; but that her neighbors, some of whom were relatives in tongue and blood, were using literary forms of speech and methods of religious teaching which in many points resembled her own. It is now seen that the inspired writers of the Old Testament wrote in the ordinary language of their day just as the New Testament writers used the ordinary vocabulary, phrases, and metaphors current in the locality from which or to which they wrote. The importance, then, of this fundamental principal of interpretation-that the terminology of the ancient document must be understood in the sense which it bore at the time when it was written, and among the Oriental people to whom it was written-can hardly be overestimated, although it is only now that it could be practically applied. When this principle is clearly grasped it will expose the fallacy of such "defenders of the faith" as seek to read "geological eras" and "wave theories of light" out of the ancient Genesis vocabulary, while it equally condemns the critical method of those who read rigid and brazen meanings into the words "day" and "firmament," or mythical interpretations into the words "abyss" and "chaos," because of the root meanings of these terms. The primary meaning of a word is always interesting to a philological antiquarian but not always

of value in the practical interpretation of an ancient document. The important question is, What did this word mean to the writer? It is astonishing to find that the most ardent advocates of a late date for the Genesis narratives are often the very ones who insist most strenuously that certain words in that account must be understood with the meaning which they possessed in the dim past ages before the account originated in its present form or was received as Holy Scripture.

2. This leads to what we consider practically a new point, so far as scientific biblical interpretation is concerned. In the translation and explanation of any ancient Oriental document it must never be forgotten that all Eastern peoples speak and write in pictures. They do not make the distinction between prose and poetry which we do. They never talk prose, in our sense. Almost every word is a metaphor. To dress up the picture-words of the Hebrew language in the philosophical or scientific clothing of the twentieth century is as bad as to put a French gown on Mary Magdalene or a Rough Rider uniform on Saint Paul, the typical "good soldier." Figures of speech are even yet the "flowers of language," but Orientals live in flower gardens. Every sentence is a bouquet. To translate any Oriental book without taking account of this fact-which no Orientalist doubts-is to misunderstand it. A word-for-word translation is a mistranslation. To take it "just as it reads" is not to take it "just as it means." To petrify these figures of speech is to take the life out of them. The Hebrews, like their neighbors, were always expecting metaphorical and symbolic meanings in religious speech. Every word of Jesus is a chrysalis. Interpreted by the spiritual imagination, it takes wings; refused this spiritual meaning, it dies in your

Sometimes a word grows into a meaning the opposite of that which it had originally. So our word slave was a word originally applied to princes, and Hindu primarily meant, robber." The Hebrew stranger" becomes in the Targum "idolater" and then "swine." The old Greek word for the ignorant but trusty slave who looked after the younger members of the family, "pædagogue," is now applied to the teacher. The modern Greek term for dragoman originally meant "teacher of mysteries," and our word "adept" only a few centuries ago applied to one who was a master of magic. Such illustrations show the danger connected with this easy method now so popular, of learning what the Hebrews believed, mythologically and otherwise, at the time the Psalms were written, or Isaiah, or Genesis, by getting the root meaning of the words used. It must be constantly held in mind by the exegete that the Bible dates from the historic period. The language is fully formed when we first see it, little change or growth being discernible from its first appearance to its disappearance as a biblical language. The earliest prophecies are written in more elegant Hebrew than the later ones. The difference between the biblical and Talmudic Hebrew is far more marked.

hand, and instead of beauty and life you have left only the cadaver of a caterpillar. The translation of the biblical books is not merely a lexicographical problem. It is a literary problem, and consists not so much in the minute separation of sources, and a determination of authorship and age of the various literary strata, as in grasping the general meaning of the documents and seizing accurately the impression which they would naturally make upon an Oriental ear. Yet, so far as the writer knows, no modern commentator or systematic theologian has used this truth as if it were of supreme vital importance. If it be true that the Scripture terms must, to be properly understood, carry the meaning they bore to the Oriental writers and their first Oriental readers, and if it be true that all Orientals spoke and wrote pictorially and not "literally," it is a most important truth. Every interpretation of Scripture must be tested according to this new standard of philological content. The interpretation may perhaps not be changed, but the basis upon which it rests will receive new support. The modern contention also, that doctrines ought not to be based upon mere verbal values, but must be determined by the context and the broad general meaning, receives new authority from this principle. It has been a great temptation to exegetes to drag Western meanings with iron pincers out of these Eastern flowers of language. It is very difficult to gather these bouquets and preserve them in our modern herbariums, which we call systematic theologies, without crushing the beauty and life out of them. Whole sects have been founded upon the literal interpretation of one verse, or even upon one Greek word-or letter! Transubstantiation is not the only doctrine which might truthfully be called "a metaphor metamorphosed into a dogma." There is scarcely a doctrine of the church which has not been hurt in its development by this Westernizing process-taking literally what was originally no more than a metaphor, trope, hyperbole, or other figure of speech. This is seen, for example, not only in the false and coarse conceptions of the Trinity as developed by various old thinkers and by the equally inadequate popular conception held by untrained minds now, but by recent criticisms of the biblical idea of God by some of our most advanced English and European