So it is,

dead letter. What men can make, men can unmake. and ever will be. The best way to oppose heresies, is by reason and argument; not by a plurality of votes. Pascal, in his Provincial Letters, speaking of the Jesuit council at the Sorbonne, and their condemnation of Arnauld without assigning any reasons for it, says, that "it was more easy to find monks than reasons. Such tactics, however, have not been confined to Jesuits. They have been practiced quite too much, in the churches of all denominations. Yet experience testifies against their soundness. Men ardent in the pursuit of truth, and at the same time enlightened, will bow only to God's authority. When the violence of pressure begins to abate, independent thinkers and investigators will start up; nor can the decrees of any council either guide or control their opinions. It is Scripture and reason and argument, and these only, that in the long run will prevail. The God who made us in his own image, rational and moral and immortal, designed it should be so; Christianity has explicitly taught that it should be so; and every history of past or future times, has served, and will serve, only to confirm it.

It were easy to occupy almost as much space as I have already taken up, in reflections upon the facts that now lie before us. But I must abstain; although the temptation to indulge is very strong. My design was to act the historian; not the theologian or the moralist. I must leave it to my readers, then, to make their own reflections.

I will add only, that I am quite sensible of the delicacy of the whole subject; so much so, that I should have entirely abstained from it, had I not been fully persuaded that something of this nature is needed, in the present state of our religious public. Very few can have access to such books, as communicate all the historical information necessary to qualify them rightly to judge of the principles and controversies of particular persons and times, in remote countries and at a distant period; and when such principles and controversies become directly or indirectly the subject of renewed discussion, a correct and adequate knowledge of them is altogether desirable.

In reviewing the whole of the preceding sketch, I am induced to think it probable, that I may be blamed both by the friends and the opponents of Arminianism. The friends will find too many sombre colours in the picture which I have drawn; the opponents, too many bright ones. I anticipate the remark, on the part of a few, that the faults of some members of the ortho

dox party should not have been made so prominent as they are; nor the extravagance of some of their doctrinal assertions have been so fully disclosed. The apprehension of those who will

prone to make remarks of this nature, is, that orthodoxy itself is in danger of being injured, by an exposure of the faults and extravagancies of its professors. This feeling may be honest in its motive; but I must believe that it is a mistaken one, yea, that it is one which does dishonour to religion in its highest and noblest sense. So the holy men of old, guided by the Spirit of the living God, did not think, when they drew the pictures of Noah, of David, of Hezekiah, of Peter, and of many others. It has always been, to my mind, one of the most convincing arguments that the authors of the Scriptures were honest and upright and independent men, that they have given a fulllength portrait of the faults as well as of the virtues of their principal and (so to speak) favourite characters. Can we do better than to walk in their steps? Or are the world at present to believe, that there have been orthodox men in past ages, or that there are any now, who have had no faults and committed no errors? Or is our attachment to party, to rise higher than our regard to the truth and the word of God? I cannot doubt how these questions should be answered; and I have performed the duty of a historian, in the preceding pages, in accordance with the answer which I cannot refrain from giving to them. I have as faithfully and fully avowed the truth, concerning those with whose sentiments I should, for the most part, be in unison, as I have concerning those from whom I should more widely differ. It results from the very nature of the case, that a dispute which leads to banishment and shedding of blood, has not been conducted with moderation, and extravagancies must be looked for in both parties. I have found them, and endeavoured faithfully to represent them. I can only say, it is my full persuasion, that no intelligent and candid man, who peruses all the sources from which my materials have been drawn, will see much cause of dissenting from the views that have now been given.

It is proper here, both for the information and satisfaction of the reader, to state the sources from which the preceding representations have been drawn. These are the following.

1. JACOBI ARMINII Opera Theologica. Lugd. Bat. 1629, small 4to. To this is prefixed PETRUS BERTIUS, De Vita et Obitu J. Arminii.

2. BAYLE, Dictionaire Historique et Critique, Tome I. 1730. 3. Supplement au Dictionaire de M. Bayle, par J. C. CHAUFEPIE, Tome I. 1750.

4. SCHROECKH, Christliche Kirchengeschichte seit der Refor mation, Theil V. 1806.

5. Histoire abrégée de la Reformation des Pays Bas, traduite du Hollandois de Gerard BRANDT, 3 vol. 12mo. 1726.

6. Acta Synodi Nationalis Dordrechti habitae, to which is appended the Judicia Theologorum Exterorum, who were present at the synod. Dort 1620, published under the direction of the synod. Also DANIEL HEINSIUS, Prefatio ad Ecclesias, a narrative concerning Arminius and his party, prefixed to the Acta Synodi.

7. SIM. EPISCOPII Opera Theologica, Goudae, 1665, 2 Tom. fol. in which are contained many pieces of a historical nature respecting the remonstrants.

8. Last, but not least, J. HALESII Epistolae, i. e. Letters of John Hales, chaplain to the English embassy at the Hague, and published originally in English in the Golden Remains of the ever memorable John Hales of Eton college, 1659, 4to. The Latin edition, Halesii Epistolae, was published by Mosheim at Hamburgh in 1724, and is prefaced by about 200 pages concerning the synod of Dort, and the life of Hales. Mosheim has inveighed, in unmeasured terms, against the synod; and he shews his partiality for the remonstrants, in his notes throughout the book. Hales was not a member of the synod, but a secret deputy of king James I. of England, sent to watch all its motions. The account which he gives of it, in his epistles addressed to Dudley Carleton the English ambassador at the Hague, is the ablest and most impartial account that we have. As he was at this period on the side of the contra-remonstrants, his letters are not liable to any suspicion of partiality in favour of the remonstrants. I regret that I could not have access to the Golden Remains, instead of Mosheim's translation; for this learned professor understood Latin better than he did English.

Never, I believe, were the records of any synod so fully published, as those of the synod of Dort. The remonstrants also published Acta Synodi, differing, of course, in regard to some statements from the one mentioned above. But I have not been able to obtain this volume.

ART. III.-ON THE LANGUAGE OF PALESTINE IN THE AGE OF CHRIST AND THE APOSTLES.

AN INTRODUCTORY ARTICLE.

By the Editor.

To the interpreter of the New Testament no subject can be more important or more interesting, than that which it is proposed to consider in the present article. The character of the Greek style of the New Testament must necessarily be intimately connected with, and dependent upon, the language which the writers used in ordinary life. If they were Hebrews, to whom the Hebrew language alone was vernacular, while they had learned the Greek only as a foreign tongue at a comparatively late period of life,-and either from books, or, as most probably must have been the case, from the necessities of intercourse,— then their style would naturally assume a very different character from what it would have been, had the Greek, in a measure at least, been also their vernacular tongue. If moreover the Hebrew, or its dialects, were the predominant language of Palestine, it is interesting and necessary to inquire also, what were the nature and condition of this tongue; whether it was the pure Hebrew of the Old Testament, or the kindred Chaldee, or the Syriac, or a mixture of both; for the influence of the national dialect upon the Greek of the New Testament must be different, according to the different nature of that dialect. If, for instance, the vernacular tongue of Matthew was the Chaldee or the Syriac, it would obviously not be the best course of proceeding in interpretation, to resort, for the sources of oriental colouring in his Greek style, first to the ancient Hebrew. The interpreter would naturally first look to the native Chaldee or Syriac of the writer; and if these failed him, might then have recourse to the Hebrew as a kindred tongue, and, in some respects, the common source of both. The first question then which presents itself, is, If the Hebrew, or any of its kindred dialects, were still spoken in Palestine in the age of Christ and the apostles, which of these dialects was the current one, and constituted the language of the country.

The character of the Greek style of the New Testament would also depend, in some measure, on the extent to which the Greek language was diffused in Palestine. If it was not spoken there at all, or at most only by a comparatively small number among the higher classes, then the authors of the New Testa

ment, who, with the exception of Paul and perhaps Luke, were "unlearned and ignorant men," must have written in a language originally foreign to them; one in which they were neither accustomed to think, nor to speak; and of course the interpreter might expect to find in their writings all those appearances both in construction and in the use of words, which would naturally occur in the style of a man writing under similar circumstances at the present day. For we are not to suppose that the inspiration under which they wrote, was one principally of words; nor that it enabled them to write better Greek, than was spoken by the people to whom their writings were addressed. If, on the other hand, the Greek language had become very generally diffused in Palestine, if it were understood and spoken not only by the learned and the upper classes, but also more or less among the common people, then we may expect to find in the New Testament a species of Greek, certainly not pure and flowing like the native Attic, but yet a national language, coloured indeed by the manners and customs and also the idioms of the country, but still no longer bearing those marks of unacquaintance and want of skill, which indicate that the writers were using a foreign tongue.

It is obvious, that these circumstances have also a very important bearing, not only on the mode of interpretation in general, but also on the very sources of interpretation in respect to the New Testament. If the writers, being Hebrews, wrote the Greek only as a foreign idiom, then of course they thought only in their own Syro-Chaldaic or Aramaean; and their thoughts, expressed in foreign words, are to be explained almost wholly by reference to their vernacular tongue. In this case, the Greek of the classic writers would have very little to do with the Greek of the New Testament; and the rules applicable to the former could not be taken as our standard in judging of the latter. If, on the contrary, the writers of the New Testament wrote as men who had understood and spoken Greek all their lives, then they partially at least thought in it, and their thoughts are to be explained by a reference to the Greek of that day and of that country, as known from other writers under the same or similar circumstances, and by a comparison with the language as used in Greece itself. Under such circumstances, the direct Hebrew or Aramaean colouring would naturally be much less conspicuous, than under the former supposition. There arises then a second question, Whether the Hebrew or its