shown that by the word spirit in the preceding verse, and by which [rather, in which] our Saviour is here said to have preached to the spirits in prison, we cannot, if the construction of the passage be regarded, understand the Holy Spirit, but the human soul of Christ, which was quickened, or preserved against the stroke of death by which his body had fallen, he proceeds to state what he conceives to be the design of Christ in visiting the abode of departed spirits, and also the substance of his announcement to them. The souls in custody, he remarks, were those "which sometime were disobedient,"-an expression which implies that they were recovered from that disobedience, and, before their death, had been brought to repentance and faith in the Redeemer to come. To such souls Christ went and preached. But what did He preach to them, and what could be the end of His preaching? Certainly He preached neither repentance nor faith; for the preaching of either comes too late to the departed soul. These souls had believed and repented, or they had not been, as the Bishop observes, in that part of the nether regions which the soul of the Redeemer visited. Nor was the end of His preaching any liberation of them from purgatorial pains, of which the Scriptures know nothing. But if he went to proclaim to them the glad tidings, that he had actually offered the sacrifice of their redemption, and was about to appear before the Father as their intercessor, in the merit of His own blood, this, says bishop Horsley, was a preaching fit to be addressed to departed souls, and would give new animation and assurance to their hope of the consummation, in due season, of their bliss; and this, it may be presumed, was the end of His preaching.

"The like figure whereunto, even baptism, doth also now save us (not the putting away of the filth of the flesh, but the answer of a good conscience toward God) by the resurrection of Jesus Christ."-Ver. 21.

Wesley better translates this verse. "The antitype whereof, baptism, now saveth us (not the putting away the filth of the flesh, but the answer of a good conscience towards God) by the resurrection of Jesus Christ ;" that is, he well observes, through the water of baptism we are saved from the sin which overwhelms the world as a flood: not, indeed, by the bare outward sign, but by the inward grace: a divine consciousness that both our persons and our actions are accepted through Him who died and rose again for us.

CHAPTER IV.

"For, for this cause was the gospel preached unto them that are dead, that they might be judged according to men in the flesh, but live according to God in the spirit."-Ver. 6.

THIS verse is very obscure, and there are numerous interpretations of it. Whitby, Wakefield, Doddridge, and others, taking nekrois (dead) figuratively, refer it to the Gentiles. Wakefield translates thus: "For this indeed was the effect of the preaching of the gospel to the dead [the unconverted Gentiles] that some will be punished as carnal men; but others [those converted to Christianity], lead a spiritual life unto God." Slade, rejecting this figurative interpretation of the word, and comparing the passage with chap. iii. 19, as does also Adam Clarke, understands the apostle to assert that the gospel had been preached, or proclaimed, even to the dead, that they will be judged by the law of nature for the things done in the body, and be rewarded in pro

portion to their deserts, by a spiritual life, according to the will and power of God. Boothroyd adopts

the interpretation of Rosenmüller and others, and understands by the dead those who had died by persecution. The last-mentioned critic thus expresses the general sense of the passage (ap. Bloomfield): "Even to those who in these times have suffered death, was brought the glad annunciation, that although they had suffered death in the flesh, yet, by the Divine omnipotence, they shall be made alive."

THE SECOND EPISTLE GENERAL
OF PETER.

CHAPTER I.

"Knowing this first, that no prophecy of the Scripture is of any private interpretation. For the prophecy came not in old time by the will of man: but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost."-Ver. 20, 21.

WHITBY, Wesley, Doddridge, Adam Clarke, and other commentators understand the idias epiluseōs of private suggestion or impulse, and refer to the following words, " for holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost." But epiluseōs will not bear this sense; and of other interpretations we think Bishop Horsley's deserves to be preferred. The English word private, he remarks, does but very darkly, if at all, convey to the understanding of the English reader the original word to which it is meant that it should answer. This denotes that peculiar appropriation of the thing with which it is joined to something else previously mentioned, which is expressed in English by the word own subjoined to the pronouns of possession: our own power-his own blood, a prophet of their own. In all these places, the Greek word which is rendered by the words our own, his own, their own, is that same word which in this text is rendered by the word private. The precise meaning, therefore, of the original, he thinks, may be thus expressed : "Not any prophecy of Scripture is of self-interpre

tation." This compound word, "self-interpretation," he observes, contains the exact and full meaning of the two Greek words, which our translators have rendered by " private interpretation," and with which no two separate words can be found in our language exactly to correspond. The meaning is just the same as might be thus expressed: "Not any prophecy of Scripture is its own interpreter." It is in this sense that the passage is rendered in the French Bible of the church of Geneva; and, what is of much importance to observe, it is so rendered in the Vulgate, which the church of Rome upholds as the unerring standard of the sacred text.

The maxim is to be applied, both to every single text of prophecy, and to the whole, says bishop Horsley. A single text of prophecy cannot be its own interpreter ; for the Scripture prophecies are not not detached predictions of separate and independent events, but are united in a regular and entire system, all terminating in one great objectthe promulgation of the gospel, and the complete establishment of the Messiah's kingdom. Of this system every particular prophecy makes a part, and bears a more immediate or a more remote relation to that which is the object of the whole. And the meaning of the whole of the prophecies of Scripture cannot be discovered, without a general knowledge of the principal events to which they allude; for prophecy was not given to enable curious men to pry into futurity, but to enable the serious and considerate to discern in past events the hand of Divine Providence.

"Scoffers, walking after their own lusts, and saying, Where is the promise of his coming? for since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation.