therefore the Lord again saith, "I am the resurrection and the life, whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die; and though he were dead, yet shall he live." When the prodigal-returned to his father, (Luke, chap. xv. verse 24,) his father said, "This my son was dead, and is alive again, was lost, and is found." With regard to the person of the Redeemer, great darkness seems to pervade the minds of christians. Instead of conceiving that God is one in essence and in person; they imagine that the Lord the Saviour is but one of three persons: and that his body bears all the wounds which his material humanity received on the cross. "Five bleeding wounds he bears," says Wesley: had he borne in mind that, as the Father hath life in himself, so hath he given to the Son to have life in himself,"could he for a moment have cherished such a thought? Can that glorified body in which "dwelleth all the fulness of the godhead bodily," be such as Wesley describes it? Impossible. How different is the view given of the Divine Being, by the New Jerusalem poet:

In agreement with this scriptural and sublimely pleasing view of the God of heaven, how sweetly does the following verse har

monize :

Rise, then, my soul from every sin,
The work of righteousness begin,
And serve this Prince of light;
Whose Spirit makes the lame to walk,
The deaf to hear, the dumb to talk,

And now to faith gives sight.

Let the views which have heretofore been given, be compared with the heavenly doctrines of the New Jerusalem, and the contrast will be found most striking. The views of the former are founded on the appearances of truth only: the latter are built on the divine reality. While the one shows nothing but " clouds and darkness round about him;" the other teaches most clearly, that righteousness and judgment are the habitation of his throne." The confusion of thought and obscurity of mind to which the

former views lead, cannot perhaps be more strikingly exemplified than in the following extract from the Wesleyan Methodist Magazine, for October, 1828, page 668. It is part of a letter which the editor supposes was written about the year 1779 or 1780, by a Mr. John Valton, then a Methodist preacher at Bath. Some unpleasantness existed in his society, which he was most laudably desirous to remove. After exhorting them to be of one mind, he thus proceeds: "My dear souls, a sudden transport fills my breast! Methinks I see you all humbled before God! Your penitent souls are sobbing, and bitterly weeping before the Lord. You cry out, Father, we have sinned against heaven and before thee, and are no more worthy to be called thy children. Your violent prayer prevails. JESUS disarms the wrath of Almighty God. The offended JEHOVAH cries out,

My son is in my servant's prayer,

And Jesus forces me to spare!?" :

From the confusion of tongues at the building of Babel, to the present era, surely nothing in language and idea ever surpassed the representation here given! When the erystal light of the New Jerusalem is cast on the falses of doctrine in the church called christian, like " Ithuriel's spear," it will manifest their ugly and monstrous forms. Having been delivered from the obscurity and perplexity to which tri-personal doctrines inevitably lead, how earnest ought we to be in pointing to him" who will blot out our transgressions for his own sake, and no more remember our sins: shewing that he alone hath "all power in heaven and in earth,” that he is at once the mighty God, the everlasting Father, and

the Prince of Peace."

Manchester,

ABDA.

́November 5th, 1823.

PRESERVATION OF THE WORD IN ALL ITS INTE

GRITY.

To the Editors of the Intellectual Repository,

GENTLEMEN,

I OBSERVE in your last number, p. 517, you have introduced some queries by Ianwßos, (Jacobus,) concerning the authenticity of a passage in 2 Sam. xxiv. 13, in which the punishment an

nounced to David for numbering the people was to be either seven years of famine, or three months' flight before his enemies, or three days' pestilence in the land, to be determined by his own choice of one of those evils. And on comparing the above passage with 1 Chron. xxi. 12, where the same circumstance is referred to, it is found, that, instead of seven years' famine, only three are mentioned. The question in this case is, How is such disagreement to be reconciled? Which is the correct reading, that contained in the book of Samuel, which is universally allowed to he of divine authority, or that in the book of Chronicles, which by the New Church at least is regarded as a mere human composition, so far as it is not copied from the Word itself? For a solution of the difficulty, an appeal is made to Dr. A. Clarke, who at once pronounces, that there is an error in the divine book, that the true reading is preserved in the book of Chronicles, and that the number seven in the former ought to be three, as in the latter. With this judgment, I observe, gentlemen, you have expressed your concurrence, partly because it appears from the context as if it was intended, that the several punishments proposed to David should all be of one numerical character, namely, three years' famine, three months' flight before enemies, or three days' pestilence; and partly because the Septuagint translation agrees in that respect with the book of Chronicles. On each of these points I wish to make a few remarks, as well as on another of equal importance, relative to the preservation of the Word in all its integrity, even to the present day, and the quarter where we may expect to find it.

I. And, first, I would observe, that the argument adduced by Dr. A. Clarke, in support of his opinion, that the letter zain, denoting seven, as being the seventh letter of the Hebrew alphabet, has been mistaken for gimel, denoting three, because it is the third in order, is by no means satisfactory. For the similarity of the two letters, on which the argument chiefly rests, is far from being so evident, as to render it probable, that the one has been adopted for the other. Indeed they can scarcely be said to bear a greater resemblance to each other than the figures 7 and 3, which few transcribers, if any, could easily mistake. But as your correspondent Jacobus has well observed, Dr. Clarke has not pointed out in what edition, or manuscript, there is a reading, in which either of these letters occurs, instead of the proper word at full

length. Until proof is brought, that some of the authentic ancient manuscripts, acknowledged by the Jews to be such, were written in that loose manner, putting the letters of the alphabet in the room of words, the assertion of learned men, that such was the practice of transcribers of the Word in very remote times, can be regarded in no other light than as mere conjecture, made for the purpose of explaining away difficulties, which to them appear insurmountable in any other way. Are we to suppose, that in all those passages, where numbers make so considerable a part of the text, they were designated by simple letters or abbreviated characters, and not by words at length? Or by what rule are we to judge, that such characters were used in some places, and not in all? The probability is, that the divine books were in all their parts originally written in plain words, and that every authentic copy down to the present time has been of a like description. The titles of the books, and their division into chapters and verses, together with the figures and letters of the alphabet as signs of numeration, being all of human contrivance, form no part of the real Word, and therefore do not belong to the question.

II. The next argument in favour of the number three instead of seven, in 2 Sam. xxiv. 13, as corresponding with the three months and three days mentioned in the same passage, is, that the Septuagint version has that number; and therefore it is concluded, that "the copies used by the seventy must have had it, or they would not have given three in their translation." And you add, gentlemen, that "this testimony is sufficient to determine the question." Knowing as I do, that the only motive which actuates you in your criticisms on the language and spirit of the Holy Word, is to exalt it in the estimation of every reader, and to spread more widely among men a correct knowledge of those divine truths, which enrich it above every human production, it is with concern that, after mature reflection, I find myself led to a conclusion different from that above stated. I cannot think, that the Septuagint version is any authority in the case before us. The persons engaged in that work were learned, but not inspired men: they had no knowledge whatever that an internal sense belonged to any of those books, in the translation of which they were engaged. Like other learned men of our own times, when they found two parallel passages in different books, the one

expressed as in 2 Sam. xxiv. 13, and the other as in 1 Chron. xxi. 12, both agreeing in all points except in the number of the years of famine, it is probable, that they would hesitate a-while, and debate the matter among themselves before they came to a final decision, whether to render the two passages as they actually found them, at variance with each other, or to make them both harmonize together by equallizing the numbers. If they gave the numbers as they really were, seven in one passage, and three in the other, though both referred to the same thing, they might naturally think there was a danger that the value of the whole work would be diminished in the opinion of the public. But if they put forth their translation in a way that might render it less objectionable, by making the numbers in both passages corres pond with each other, so as to meet the expectation of those who judge of divine things by the apparent reasonableness of the literal sense, and a kind of uniformity in the external expressions, in that case they would think themselves justifiable in altering the number seven in Samuel, to make it agree with the three years' famine in the book of Chronicles. And this, I apprehend, was actually the case: the translators of the Old Testament into Greek were desirous that their work should be well received by the learned of the Heathen world, as well as by the prince who employed them; and fearing lest so considerable a difference in two of the historical books, as that above stated, might become a ground of serious objection to the authenticity of the whole, they concluded, that the safest way was to make the number of years the same in both passages; especially as three years' famine appeared to be a more reasonable punishment than seven, and more consistent also with the other alternatives of three months' flight before enemies, and three days' pestilence in the land.

It is well known, that in the Septuagint version there are many other deviations from the original Hebrew: and being itself only a translation into Greek by men having no pretensions to supernatural inspiration, just as the Vulgate is a translation into Latin, and as our common version is a translation into English, in each of which last named there are also very considerable deviations from the Hebrew standard, there is not a shadow of reason, as it appears to me, why we should attempt to rectify the original by or according to any one of these translations of mere human authority.