His words of all the prophets, for we do not receive the vowels from some later Jews, but from the Prophets themselves." Such, also, is the comment of the distinguished Hebraist, Hugh Broughton, as well as that of the great Piscator, who says: "It appears from this text (Matt. v. 18), that the Holy Bible, in the time of Christ, had the points, and that these points were confirmed by our Saviour."

3. The Bible asserts the inspiration of the very vowelpoints, because it says "words which the Holy Ghost teacheth "the words. "Words," notice, brethren, not "half-words "-not wind-swept skeletons, which wait to be filled in by human conjecture. Consonants are not words, and if men can make vowels, they can also make consonants, and so make their own words, and so make a Bible. Nor does the minuteness of the vowel-point impugn the argument, since God, who can engrave an Aleph, can equally engrave a Kibbuts or a Sheva. Exod. xxxii. 16 says that He did so.

4. The inference is unavoidable from Deut. xxvii. 8, where the command is given to write "very plainly "-literally to cut each mark in deep. This must include the vowel-marks, as well as consonants, for on them, most of all, the plainness must depend. There are innumerable passages where, without the vowel-points, no man alive can tell the meaning of the Holy Ghost, nor know the mind of God.

Rome opposes, with all her most virulent force, the vowel-points, because, once rid of these, she makes the Church the arbiter--the umpire and interpreter. The Church puts in the points.

This anti-scriptural and arrogant assumption of exclusive rights in the monopoly of truth-the very doctrine of the scribes and Pharisees who sit in Moses' seat-was never voiced more boldly than by that bulwark of the

papacy, Morinus, who does not hesitate to put it that "the reason why God ordained the Scriptures to be written in this ambiguous manner (i. e., without the Points), is because it is His will that every man should be subject to the judgment of the Church, and not to interpret the Bible in his own way. For, seeing that the reading of the Bible is so difficult, and so liable to various ambiguities, from the very nature of the thing, it is plain that it is not the will of God that every one should rashly and irreverently take upon himself to explain it; nor to suf fer the common people to expound it at their pleasure; but that in those things, as in other matters respecting religion, it is His will that the people should depend upon the priests."

Counter to this entire principle of Rome, Protestantism stands for the points, and the more, that she is driven to substitute for an Infallible Church, an Infallible SOMETHING-a Bible.

"The Bible," says Protestantism, "is independent of all men of all tradition, of all councils, of all decretals and canons. It needs no Pope; nor college of scarletfrocked cardinals; no Ecumenical Assembly to endorse its claim."

"The Church," says Protestantism, "is built on the Bible, and not the Bible on the Church." The Church is to be shaped to the Bible, not the Bible to the Church. The Church is to return to the Bible, not the Bible to the Church. The Church is not the keeper of the Bible, but the Bible keeps the Church. The only barrier against backsliding; the only hope in reform; the only power to heal, that is vital, is the Book of Books, and the conviction that its every utterance and every pen-stroke is Divine.

5. A fifth and final indirect but powerful testimony of the Scripture to the vowel-points, is in the marginal notes

which the Hebrew brings with it-the so-called Keri VeKethib. The Keri in the margin nowhere changes the vowels of the text. The margin everywhere testifies to the vowel-points as authentic. It is the consonants in every instance that are changed.

The Vowel-points then, according to the Scripture as well as the universal Jewish tradition, are an integral part of the text of the very handwriting of God. The Kabbalah (Sohar I; 15, b.) asserts that "the Vowel-points proceeded from the same Holy Spirit who indited all the sacred Scriptures.”

Suppose one to take the opposite ground, that the consonants alone were inspired and the vowels, a human invention, were afterward introduced. Now see the difficulties:

When? At what moment were they introduced? Such a change as the pointing over-from Genesis to Revelation-of an unpointed Bible must have produced among Christians, as well as Jews, little less than an earthquake.

Press the argument further: The Points are in existence. They are here. Not only do we have books written and printed without them, but we have books WITH them, the Great Temple Copy, of which these shorthand, ephemeral copies are briefs. Where did the points come from which are to-day upon the MSS. considered as authority? those MSS. which regulate criticism and are the unswerving conservators of the true text? The points upon those MSS., whence did they come?

Press the argument still further. It is said that the points were invented by the Masorites because we get them from the Masorites, but the question echoes and still echoes, "Whence did they get them?"

Press the argument home to the wall. It is said that the points were invented by the Masorites. It is said so,

because Levita first said so. But what did he know about it? Nothing. He stood, as Buxtorf shows, alone-a single man against the sentiment and history of his whole nation. His speculation was built rashly up on a conjecture like a blind man's dream-upon a fancy, rootless as a mushroom growth. There were several schools of the Masorites. Which school invented the points? Why did not other schools-the jealousy of scholars is proverbial-observe, dissent, dispute them? How explain the miracle of a complete unanimity and unexceptional subjection to the school of Tiberias, if school of Tiberias it was? How account for it that childish, doting Rabbins of Tiberias, "men more mad than Pharisees, bewitching with traditions and bewitched, blind, crafty, raging," should have shown such nice Divine composure and exactness as appears in all the adaptations of the points? "Look at the men," says Dr. Lightfoot in his masterly response to Walton's Prolegomenon. "Read over the Jerusalem Talmud, and see there how R. Judah, R. Chaninah, R. Hoshaia, R. Chija Rabba and the rest of the grand Masorites behave themselves. How earnestly they labor at nothing; how childishly they handle serious disputes, how much froth, venom, smoke-pure nothing in their disputations. Then if you can believe the pointing of the Bible came from such a school," become a Jew yourself, "believe also their Talmuds. The pointing of the Bible savors of the work of God the Holy Ghost and not of that of lost and blinded and besotted men."

To these considerations let us add the following, which rest the argument in a reductio ad absurdum.

Remove the points from the text, for an interval, say, of 500 years, and no man could, from the consonants only, make out the Hebrew. The vowels are indispensable for reading and teaching a language. What one might do with briefs-a skeleton-after he has mastered a tongue is

one thing, but what a beginner can do is another. "It was," says Dr. Gill, "the duty and the interest of every Hebrew to read his Bible, that being the charter of his salvation-a charter written not for learned men only, but for the common people-men, women, and children who could not read without the points."

But lastly-to round up the whole- Vowels are the life of a language-the consonants are not. The consonants are simply stops upon the breath; but the breath-Ah, E, O-Ye-Ho-Vah-is primal, the soul. As says the Kabbalah, the oldest and most eminent Jewish authority, "Consonants are the body, and the vowel-points the soul; the consonants move with the motion and stand still with the resting of the vowel-points, just as an army moves after its sovereign." "Vowels," says Dr. Gill," are the life and soul of language. Letters without them are indeed dead letters; the consonants stubborn, immovable things; they cannot even be pronounced without vowels, which are, as Plato says, their necessary bond." That, therefore, the Hebrew, the first and most perfect language of all, God's own peculiar language, should be without them, is inconceivable.

V. And so we reach the fifth and closing Head-the Casket of the Gem. The Bible is its own self-evidence, not only in its Immortality-in its Sublime Authority-in its Transcendent Doctrine-in its Direct Assertions— but also in the very Languages in which it is enshrined.

Let us go back to the Hebrew-to God's language-to the tongue in which He said, "Let there be light!" before there was a world.

The oldest languages are philologically the most perfect, and nothing else, perhaps, betrays so deep, so pathetic a stamp of the Fall as does the downward progress of the human tongue.