it is brought before them, endeavour to close their eyes to it. But the sooner they face the difficulty the better. For infidels trade upon it; and until it is met and answered, honest Doubters have a tendency to become more and more sceptical. The truth is that we have to face a considerable number of verbal inaccuracies, the proper reply to which does not consist in our blunt denial of them, but in our fairly, and with scholarlike acumen, accounting for them. I mention only four, as samples of the rest. (1) It is written in Matt. xxvii. 9, “Then was fulfilled that which was spoken by Jeremy the prophet, saying, And they took the thirty pieces of silver, the price of Him that was valued, whom they of the children of Israel did value." Now the quotation is from the prophet Zechariah, not Jeremiah; nothing is easier, therefore, than for an infidel to say, "That single word of St. Matthew proves him to be inaccurate, and invalidates his testimony in all other respects." (2) It is said in 1 Sam. vi. 19, "He smote the men of Bethshemesh, because they had looked into the ark of the Lord, even He smote of the people fifty thousand and seventy men." Now fifty thousand men implies a total population of about one hundred and seventy thousand persons, yet Bethshemesh was a small country village. Hence one can understand a sceptical critic strongly impugning these words as untrustworthy, and alleging that an author who could write in this Verbal Inaccuracies. 91 manner is not to be deemed credible in his other statements. (3) By comparing 2 Kings xvi. 2, with 2 Kings xviii. 2, we learn that Ahaz came to the throne at the age of twenty, reigning sixteen years; and that Hezekiah his son succeeded him at the age of twenty-five. In other words, Ahaz must have been a father at the age of eleven. (4) We read in 2 Chron. xxi. 20, that Jehoram was "thirty and two years old when he began to reign, and he reigned in Jerusalem eight years." He was, therefore, forty years old at the time of his death. Now in the following chapter (verses 1, 2), it is distinctly stated that Ahaziah, the youngest son of Jehoram, was "forty and two years old when he began to reign, and he reigned one year in Jerusalem." Hence he died at the age of forty-three. In other words, that he was born before his own father. It is not surprising that minds which are disposed to cavil should rise up from the study of these criticisms with unpleasant doubts about the veracity of such authorship. But are we sure that these authors did write the words just quoted? Because if not, all this criticism at once falls to the ground. I therefore come to the Caution just laid down, viz. that the text of Scripture, like that of many secular books, may now contain verbal inaccuracies which were not in the original autographs, or first editions of their works, and for which, therefore, their authors are not properly responsible. Let me furnish two illustrations by way of ex ample. The first shall be from a poem of old George Herbert, entitled "The Elixir of Life," in which the following passage occurs :— 66 'All may of Thee partake! Nothing can be so mean, Which, with his tincture (for Thy sake), Now George Herbert wrote the third line thus: “Which, with this tincture (for Thy sake),” : making the whole sense plain and perspicuous. By some printer's error, however, the word "his" became substituted for "this." Yet the misprint, obvious as it appears, has been published through continuous editions of Herbert's works. There is a similar instance in a poem of H. Vaughan, of A.D. 1614-1695, entitled "The Rainbow," in which the following lines occur:— "When thou dost shine, darkness looks white and fair, Forms turn to music, clouds to smiles and air. In the original manuscript of the poet, the last of these lines was written "Storms turn to music, clouds to smiles and air.” Nevertheless, most modern editions of the Silex Scintillans, in which the poem occurs, repeat the error of some old edition of the poem, in which "Forms" was misprinted for "Storms;" thereby so Errors of Copyists. 93 obscuring the sense as to lay the author open to the severest criticism. Now if these textual errors have proved possible, even since the invention of printing, how probable was it that similar mistakes should have been made in the text of the sacred books, considering that their accuracy depended on the penmanship of a number of separate copyists. Many of these manuscripts were written from dictation, one man reading to various transcribers; by which means accuracy was greatly endangered. From the contracted method of writing proper names, for example, how easy it must have been, and how likely, for some early transcriber of St. Matthew's Gospel to have turned Zechariah (Ziov), by an inadvertent slip of the pen, into Iɩû, and so to have written Jeremiah; the mistake being followed by subsequent copyists. Why should we refuse to allow this explanation of an ancient textual error, when, with all the superior advantages of modern printing, similar errors have occurred among our own more recent authors? Literary criticism might very easily produce a large number of parallel illustrations to this from the manuscript editions of the Greek and Latin Classics. Yet when any such textual error is discovered, no critic would think of making the original author responsible for it. He would say, "Here is a mistake of some early transcriber which has been unfortunately followed by successive copyists;" and he would extol the science of criti cism, not by using it to depreciate the author's credibility, but by exhibiting its power of disentangling textual difficulties so as to vindicate the correctness of the original autograph. That being so, I ask, why should not Biblical criticism enjoy the same prerogative? Why should the Bible, which is, after all, a series of literary MSS., be dealt with in a different style of textual criticism from that which other literary MSS. receive, because its original autographs were written under inspiration? The mode or method of its composition is one thing; the minute exactness with which that composition may have been transmitted in reference to certain words by means of manuscript copies is another thing. Textual criticism has nothing whatever to do with the former; with the latter it has everything to do. With reference to Hebrew numerals the case is even more striking; for, it must be remembered, the Jews had no special figures to denote numbers as we have. These were marked only by the letters of the alphabet, the addition of little marks turning tens into hundreds and hundreds into thousands. Besides which, the shape of the Hebrew letters being often extremely similar, the slightest miswriting, even by three or four hairs' breadth, would often be enough to change the number indicated. In the face of facts like these, therefore, it only wants the commonest candour to admit that errors of the kind just named may have easily crept in here and there, even among the most careful transcribers of |