able as that there is a power to woo up the living flowers in springtime from their dead seeds in the earth.

Whence comes it? Certainly it is no inherent power. Development, not transformation, is the order of life. Certainly not from the teachings of Christ. Precepts, so long as they are announced merely and not lived, are repelling and discouraging precisely in proportion to their perfection. The glory of beautiful precepts belongs not to him who enunciates them, but to him who reduces them to practice. The beauty of precepts is one of harmony; if they spring not out of a life and harmonize with it, they bear on the brow that odious stamp of hypocrisy and pretension that defaces all loveliness. Hence the futility of that method of attacking the dignity of Christ so long relied on, and not yet abandoned, which seeks to show that he borrowed his precepts and plagiarized his system of morals. The ancient writings of the Persians, the Hindoos, the Greeks, and the Romans, the times of the Talmud, and even the lucubrations of certain Hebrew doctors that lived after Christ, were ransacked, and it was conclusively shown that the extracted and concentrated wisdom of them all, compounded, after Christ had shown the method, would form a system nearly as complete as his. But such an olla podrida of disjecta membra, what is it when concocted but a dead mass of depressing precepts, pointing indeed toward heaven, but leading toward hell? Prove that Christ originated no single precept, and you have not touched his glory. So long as it is plain that he not only lived with a nobility above the gathered conception of all moralists, but gave also to others the secret of such a life, who cares to know where he got his rules of living? Certainly, he never borrowed that life, nor plagiarized that life-giving energy which he transmitted to his followers. And if we cared to ask where he got his rules, would it not seem more probable that one with such unborrowed power of living grandly should have been equally gifted in thinking grandly? Can we not more easily conceive him thinking out his own system than gathering it eclectically from inferior souls?

Not only was this transforming power not in his precepts, it could not have been in his example. Granted that Christ left a peerless example, and that it is an extremely attractive one-which latter is by no means capable of proof when we consider the manner of men it was set before-and it is plain that a mere example could only have produced servile copies. Those who admired it and were drawn by it, left solely to its attractions, could only have striven to reproduce it in its historical minutiæ. Evidently such is not the copying of Christ's example which we have in the Church. Each in

dividual, with the most unshackled intrepidity, deviates from the outward form; each unhesitatingly, and without the least feeling of sacrilege, adapts it to his own circumstances, perhaps in the freedom of his adaptation retaining no single external lineament of Christ's example. What apparent feature of Christ's example does the Christian warrior reproduce, the Christian detective, the Christian executioner? Yet are all these in his image, giving it with a manysided accuracy that were possible only through fearless deviation and adaptation. What orders all these seeming aberrations into such singular success? Evidently, there must be an unseen guide, a principle of life. It was a certain principle of life that unfolded itself, in the given circumstances and demands of his position, into the life of Christ, and which precisely harmonized that life with his position and purpose; it must be the same indwelling spirit that in differing circumstances and demands works out a more or less harmonious life in his followers. In other words, it is the disembodied Christ working through us and in us, transforming our sinful souls, gradually bringing them into his own likeness.

Here, again, we may appeal to Christian consciousness in confirmation of argument. There is one unvarying acclamation of testimony from Paul to the latest convert: "Not I, but Christ that dwelleth in me." Reflect that among these witnesses are men of the keenest psychological insight, men of the most dogged and practical common sense, men of the broadest intellectuality and with the utmost jealousy for the freedom of thought.

Of course there is an answer to all this, and it is as ready as it is shallow: "The ideal Christ is born of devout fancy, and the conviction of his presence and activity belongs with the curious phenomena of religious enthusiasm and pious illusion." That is to say, all the purity and nobility of the best men for now two thousand years have been born of a mistake, and all the grandeur of the sublimest yearnings and strivings of Christian men has originated in hallucination and been nourished by a lie! He who can seriously advance and maintain such an hypothesis would hardly be benefited or affected by legitimate arguments. He who can honestly accept so mad a theory of history must be so abnormal intellectually or morally as to be beyond the reach of rational refutation. We will ask, however, what made the fancy of Christ's age so devout, and gave to its progeny such singular, such peerless purity? Was it the impiety everywhere prevailing? Was it the growing degeneracy that threatened to engulf every pure thing in a shoreless deep of pollution? Strange spontaneous product of such an era! Sooner might the salt sea be

deemed the mother of the sweet, fresh fountains that burst up through her bitter waves. Who gave to mental and moral aberration such strange unanimity and accuracy that it should chisel out the most delicately defined, the most exquisitely harmonious ideal that humanity knows? Who gave to hallucinations, generally so fitful, so variable, such continuity, such persistency? Eighteen centuries of hallucination propagated through countless millions of fantastics! So many Christians, so many dreamers! the fantasy always the same, the deluding dream never varying, the spectre always Christ, none other, haunting all ages alike, and presenting himself without essential change of feature to the disordered imagination of the poet and the man of business, the scholar and the clown! Bacon suggested that an entire age might be affected with mania, but here are whole eras of the strangest illusions; here are generations of epidemic and hereditary madness; here are centuries following centuries in one unvarying delusion, a procession of blind æons tumbling one after another into the ditch. And, most marvellous of all, this undying vagary has proved most fruitful in enlightenment; delusion has begotten insight; illusion has brought forth the loveliest verities; a lie has generated a whole family of purest truth; midsummer madness has eventuated in the most perfect sanity of conduct; coward credulity of belief has sent forth wondrous heroisms of conduct. Blessed madness may it go on to inflict the nations, may it put generation after generation, nation after nation, beside themselves.

ALBANY.

D. M. REEVES.

"And Jesus answered and said, Suffer ye thus far. And he touched his ear and healed him."-Luke xxii. 51.

The expression which our Lord used at the time of his arrest in the garden, immediately after Peter had cut off the right ear of Malchus, has perplexed and divided the critics. The original words, tāte čwę TOUTOU, are brief and elliptical; and the English versions are necessarily obscure: we say necessarily, because they could not be otherwise, without assuming the form of a paraphrase, rather than a translation. Our common version, "suffer ye thus far," is followed, substantially, by most recent revisions.

The first question to be determined is, to whom were these words of the Lord addressed,-to his enemies? or to Peter and the other disciples? · Alford takes the former view, and, while he retains the translation of the common version in his text, adds this explanatory note: "Give me thus much liberty, viz., to stretch out his arm and touch the man's ear." Van Oosterzee, in Lange's commentary, defends the same view, and is endorsed by his American annotator, Rev. C. C. Starbuck. Noyes seems to be of the same opinion, for he translates the words, "permit thus far." Mr. Starbuck admits, however, that this is not the usual view. It would be without precedent, to suppose that our Lord asked leave of his captors to perform this miracle. It would be in perfect harmony with the accounts of Matthew and Mark, to understand it as a part of the

Lord's rebuke to his disciples. And it is quite as easy to supply the needful ellipsis, and to find a pertinent explanation of the words, on this theory, as it is on the other. The older commentators seem to us, in this case, to have apprehended the true sense, rather than the more recent ones. Bengel, for instance, with his usual brevity, says, "elnev, dixit, Petro et ceteris. Matthew xxvi. 52.-care, sinite, sic Acts v. 38.—ews Toutou, nolite progredi." He also refers to a precisely similar expression in the LXX. Leviticus xxvi. 18. Rosenmuller, Campbell, Bloomfield, and Olshausen, all explain the words in the same way. Campbell translates "let this suffice." Olshausen thus paraphrases the expression: "Stay! thus far and no further." The truth is, that while es properly means, "up to a certain point," it not only suggests, but very often distinctly implies, the correlative thought, "and no farther;" and this implied negative sometimes assumes the prominent place, and casts the direct and positive sense into the background. Such, in our opinion, is its true force in the passage now under consideration. Olshausen's paraphrase, we think, exactly hits the sense. "Stop at this," would be a less paraphrastic, but also less perspicuous translation. The verb often has the transitive sense, "to leave," as in Acts xxiii. 32; and sometimes, as here, the intransitive sense, expressed by our colloquial phrase, “leave off." "Leave off this violence at this point, it has gone far enough." This use of ws is very common in the Greek of the present day. An illustration is at hand. A political paper, after describing the progress of a certain public measure,-suppose it to be the investigation into the frauds in New York,-closes its article with this sentence," rà zpáɣpata, kotnòv, pévovory Ews èo,—the matter remains, therefore, at this point." This peculiar use of ews, in which the implied negative takes precedence of the direct positive, was worthy of recognition in Winer's New Testament Grammar, but he has taken no notice of it.

The Greek Aorist with Adverbs of Present Time.

The proper equivalent of the aorist tense, in ordinary cases, is doubtless the English preterite, or indefinite past, in our older grammars misnamed the Imperfect. Our common version so translates it, in the great majority of cases; though the English perfect is used in many cases where most recent revisions adhere to the preterite. Unquestionably our English usage sometimes requires that it be represented by the pluperfect. The Bible Union revision employs the preterite more generally than any other revision with which we have compared it; yet even this does not hesitate to use occasionally the perfect or the pluperfect.

But this Greek aorist is not unfrequently accompanied by an adverb of present time. How should it be translated in such cases?

There are three adverbs of present time, which are joined with the aorist tense of the verb in the New Testament, namely, võv, žồŋ and äpti. (We disregard, in this connection, the distinction between and ví, as being only one of emphasis, and as being, moreover, very uncertain,

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