A LECTURE VII. THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED. T the revival of letters, keen controversies arose, and long raged, with regard to the literary capabilities of the languages in which the Bible was written, and its consequent qualities of style. There were not wanting those, of more piety than wisdom, who contended for perfections of diction and of eloquence, which the sacred writers themselves resolutely disown. They declared that the Hebrew, being the original language (which they took for granted), must be as copious and expressive as any of later derivation; and that the New Testament,-in spite of its being in that "common Greek" which was formed after the Macedonian conquests, and in the formation of which, as is usual in such cases, the language had undergone great changes of structure; in spite of its being full of grammatical idioms which would have shocked an Attic ear, and in spite of Syriac, Hebrew, and Chaldee barbarisms, which would have shocked it still more, -wanted little of Attic purity, and could match in force and grace the periods of Demosthenes or Plato.' I There is an excellent dissertation of Werenfels, entitled De Stylo Scriptorum Novi Testamenti, in which many of these follies are exposed and rebuked in a spirit of criticism far in advance of the time. They much mistook the matter. While contending that the Bible had a force and grace of its own, which would more than justify comparison with the classic writers, they should have owned that it is palpably destitute, and proclaims its destitution, of the elaborate polish and artificial beauty of the eloquence which "man's wisdom teacheth." As truth and candour should have compelled them to acknowledge so much, so they should have gladly accepted the position, and made their argumentative gain of it. They should have shown, in the first place, as Michaelis does, that the very style of the New Testament, with its strong tincture of Hebrew and oriental thought and idiom, is itself a voucher for its antiquity and genuineness; that none but Jewish Christians could have written it; that after the destruction of Jerusalem it was as incredible that impostors could have written in so peculiar a dialect, as that they should have been able to weave a contexture of narrative which, like that of the New Testament, is so minutely in harmony with the events and customs of the preceding period as known from profane history. Next, they should have argued that, willingly admitting the imperfections of the vehicle which the writers of the Bible employed, -the ruggedness and restricted compass of the Hebrew, the barbarisms, the solecisms, uncouthness, and deformity of the Greek, it is all the more wonderful that, in spite of all this, the writings of the Bible have somehow been imbued with a force, grandeur, and beauty of their own, which have procured for them a name and place in the forefront even of the world's literature, and extorted the highest admiration even of those who denied them all other than a literary claim to it. That the Bible possesses many qualities of style, which, like so many other things touched in this volume, make it unique among books, and fit it for being cosmopolitan, is what I am about to endeavour to show. It is only a few of these properties that I have space to touch; but they will be sufficient, I think, to prove what has been just said. Of course, though I have said the Bible is generally characterised by its own peculiarities, there are large portions of it -consisting of dry statements of the barest fact, genealogical catalogues, juridical matter - which, however conducive to some of the many ends enumerated in the preceding lecture, do not admit of any beauty or grace of composition; or any excellence, indeed, beyond that (not a very common one) of saying the thing that is meant to be said in the plainest way and in the simplest words. But large as is the amount of matter to be deducted on this account, even in the residuum there is more than enough to test the justice of what I have said,or to confute it. Speaking generally, I venture to say that the style of the Bible is very distinguishable from that of all other literature. It is neither oriental nor occidental; its writers were, indeed, of the East, and as they speak naturally, they have a tinge of oriental thought and |