ferent opinion rests, and then turn to the comments which I have made on those texts respectively. Intentionally, I am sure, I have not omitted any passage pertaining to the question, or done injustice to the argument which it may be thought by others to uphold. In respect to every passage which I have treated, I have honestly endeavored to ascertain the sense which the writer or speaker had in his mind, and intended to express.

The quotations from the Old Testament in the New, have, of course, had a principal share of my attention. In many of these, it has been the opinion of Christian scholars, that Jesus and the Apostles and Evangelists ascribed supernatural foreknowledge to the postMosaic writers of the Old Testament, and even represented as supernatural predictions passages which do not seem naturally to bear that character in their original use and connection. From an early age of Christianity to the present time, it has been the self-imposed task of commentators to maintain that this supposed representation, by Evangelists and Apostles, of the sense of the Old Testament writers, was a correct representation. In this argument, I am undoubtingly of the opinion, that Collins and other infidels were right in saying that such commentators have failed. Christianity needs, in this particular, a different defence from what has been made.

William Whiston, the associate and the successor of Sir Isaac Newton as Mathematical Profes

sor at Cambridge, made a deplorably lame reply to Collins, in his treatises, entitled, "The Literal Accomplishment of the Scripture Prophecies," and "A Supplement to the Literal Accomplishment of the Scripture Prophecies." He assented to both the postulates of his opponent; namely, first, that the New Testament writers had applied the Old Testament passages in question to the proof of Christianity; and, secondly, that, in point of fact, those passages, as they now stand, are inapplicable to that use. But he assumed the utterly indefensible position, that the Old Testament had, in those passages, been corrupted by the Jews since the Apostles' time, for the very purpose of invalidating their argument; that, as those passages originally stood in the Hebrew Bible, and as they stood at the period when the Apostles quoted them, they were exact descriptions of Jesus, his religion, and his times, and received in him and his Gospel their literal fulfilment; and that it was only by the perfidious tampering of unbelievers with the records, in the second century, that this correspondence had been made to vanish. I do not know that Whiston's reasoning ever satisfied any wise man, except himself.*

My very able and learned predecessor and successor in the chair of Biblical Literature at our University have presented a different view of the subject. Acceding to the prevailing opinion, that, when an Evan

* See my "Lowell Lectures," Vol. II. pp. 215, 216.

gelist or Apostle made a quotation from the Old Testament with such a form of introduction as "All this was done that it might be fulfilled," &c., he often meant to represent the original writer as having uttered a prediction now accomplished, they hold that the Evangelist or Apostle was in error in his interpretation of the language quoted by him. They urge that the commission of the Apostles and Evangelists to preach Christianity does not imply their being divinely secured against mistakes on all related subjects; and that they might be perfectly well qualified to convey to us the miraculous evidence of the doctrine of Jesus, without being disabused of the false theories in which they had been educated, and made competent expositors of the Jewish Scriptures.

An hypothesis which has such advocates is not to be lightly dismissed.* I have given it the best con

Mr. Norton has lately passed away from the circle of friends who revered and loved him with a singular devotion.

"My thread of life has even run with his

For many a lustre."

The first time that, then a child, I heard his name, I was with Mr. Buckminster, who stopped to accost him. What a conjunction! Since that day, the thought of one has been scarcely separated from that of the other in my mind. From the moment of my entering on professional studies, I was honored with Mr. Norton's friendship, and, through the many happy years which followed, it made one of the chief joys of my life. I always lived near him afterwards, and eventually, for almost the whole of the last quarter of a century, our homes were side by side. No one who had such opportunities as mine to know the rare extent and thoroughness of his learning, his religious love of truth, and the punctilious accuracy of his habits of study and of reasoning, could dissent from him without great self-distrust. If there was any man I have known to whom I could feel safe in implicitly submitting my own judgment, it would be he. I differed from him widely on some points of Scriptural criticism, as, the external history of the Pen

sideration of which I am capable, and cannot find reason to accept it. It appears to me, that, if there was any subject on which the disciples of Jesus Matthew, John, and Peter, his personal companions and Apostles, Mark and Luke, intimate and confidential friends of Apostles, - Paul, fully instructed by Jesus himself in the long seclusion which followed his conversion (Gal. i. 11–19) — may be presumed to have been correctly informed, it was that of the evidences of the religion which they were to publish to the world. It is even particularly recorded, that their Lord, in an appearance to two disciples after his resurrection, beginning at Moses and all the prophets, expounded unto them in all the Scriptures

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tateuch, and the use made of the Old Testament by the writers of the New; but it was with such diffidence as only the most careful and often-repeated revisal of my views would have enabled me to overcome. I know of no theological scholar, who has brought the resources and charms of so various and elegant accomplishments in general learning to be subsidiary to such a rich fund of Scriptural knowledge. His great work on the "Genuineness of the Gospels a magnificent monument of erudition, logic, and taste — exhausts the argument, supersedes all that before had been written upon it in modern times, and establishes on an immovable basis that cardinal fact in the Evidences of Christianity. His Translation of the Gospels, with Notes, announced as being now in the printers' hands, is awaited with earnest expectation, as a work which may prove not inferior in importance to any that has seen the light since the time of the Reformers. It is greatly to be hoped that it may be followed by such translations and expositions of portions of the Epistles, as he is understood to have left in a state of preparation for the press.

The void which has been left by the death of this illustrious Christian scholar will not be filled in our age. Surrounded by every thing that could make life desirable, enriching it day by day with dignified employment and benignant kindness, enjoying it for himself and using it for others to the last, he resigned it in sacred peace.

"Multis ille bonis flebilis occidit;

Nulli flebilior quam mihi.”

b*

the things concerning himself" (Luke xxiv. 27). But what is decisive with me is, that, on a careful review of references to the Jewish Scriptures by Evangelists and Apostles, I cannot find an instance of what appears to me misinterpretation on their part. I am not called upon to reconcile their authority as Christian teachers with their misconceptions of the Old Testament, because I do not see that they ever misconceived it. I am persuaded that expositions of that collection of writings, some current in the time of our Saviour, and others, more numerous, in our day, are founded in error; but I am also persuaded that it is error in which the Apostles and Evangelists did not share.

The reception of my theory of the Book of Genesis, expounded in the "Academical Lectures on the Jewish Scriptures and Antiquities" (Vol. II. pp. 1122), has afforded me great satisfaction. Though well satisfied of its truth, I considered it a novelty, as little likely to find favor as any thing which I had proposed. If substantiated, it puts an end to a world of cavil. A friendly critic in the "Christian Examiner" (Vol. LIII. p. 7), while he dissents from other views maintained by me, pronounces this to be " preeminently satisfactory," as well as "original," and to "invest the book with a greater interest and higher value than can be assigned to it on any other hypothesis"; and I have been much gratified to observe a tacit adoption of this feature of my scheme in other authoritative quarters.