maintain, for a legal cause, any longer commit adultery? She may be guilty of fornication, while she remains unmarried. But the passage

It can be nothing more. involves her in adultery, if she marries again. And what is this but to say, in another shape, that as yet she is innocent; that, by means of that innocence, her former marriage is still undissolved; and that, as was just now argued, the same exception must be attributed to her, which was asserted of her husband?

I have endeavoured to prove, that your interpretation offends against right reason, because it supposes a perpetual adultery against a husband no longer existing. I conceive it to be equally repugnant to the rules of sound criticism. You destroy the essential relation of the propositions: you read the first with a restriction; you understand the last with none: and thus, instead of filling up the chasm with a continuity of

sense, give rise to two opposite meanings, under the limits of the same declaration.

For thus you interpret: "Whosoever shall

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put away his wife, except for fornication, “committeth adultery; and whoso marrieth "her that is put away (on account of for

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nication,) committeth adultery." What is there to warrant this sudden and total change of the sense? What is there to make us suppose, that an opposite meaning was intended to be thus silently brought about? My Lord, this is not usual interpretation; for a marked exception, once established, will continue its influence, unless it is done away by a subsequent declaration: unless circumstances evidently require the change; or unless a new position of the terms expressed, demands a correspondent alteration in that part which the understanding is to supply. Here, as is obvious, the continuance of the exception would make every thing plain and

consistent; yet here you are determined to drop it. And not only so, but you call in an incongruous aid from an opposite quarter; and what you should be employed in reconciling, you set at variance, by a contrariety of meaning and of consequences. See the grammatical mischief of this. The term "put away" occurs twice in this passage. By the common interpretation, it is taken in the same sense in each place, and applied to causes short of fornication. By your's, it changes its purport in the second clause, and describes a divorce, arising from fornication alone. If I complain of the alteration of one of the terms, Doddridge had before objected to that of another. This admirable man, who gratifies alternately the saint and the scholar, who fortifies the piety of his Scriptural comment with the occasional maxims of sound criticism; Doddridge, embracing that meaning of the passage which you

reject, says, "I prefer the sense here given, "because it makes this latter clause more "correspondent to the former, and prevents "the necessity of supposing the term to "be used in two different senses so near

*

Perhaps it will be urged, that the former part of the passage is to be understood with a reserve, because that reserve is expressed; and the second generally, because it is generally stated. I answer, that such is not the method to be used on this occasion.-You, my Lord, who can feel with so much particularity the caution necessary to be observed by a scholar, in his interpretation of Scripture; you, who can lay down rules, so numerous and exact, for the process of sacred criticism,† need not be informed by any man, of the appropriate restrictions which the mind must occa

* Μοιχεύω.

Epistle to Mr. King.

sionally allow, in consonance with the predominant demands of the question in hand. Not only will the general tendency of the argument affect the several parts which enter into its composition, and make them exclusively subservient to its own demonstration; not only will the several passages govern still more closely the meaning of the words within them, and restrain the apparent wideness which they assume; but, within the same limits, a particular and a general position will be coupled together, and the one compelled to forego the extensiveness of its own nature, and, for the sake of some specific purpose, follow the private designation pointed out by the other. I shall proceed to exemplify this maxim.

I have already mentioned the necessity of a double description, in cases where the relative duties call for a correspondent fulness of precept; and this I would call the rule of reciprocal positions. But there are