reading; the manuscript evidence alone is decisive, while the correspondence with the previous clause (πᾶν πνεῦμα δ ὁμολογεῖ Ἰησοῦν Χριστὸν ἐν σαρκὶ ἐληλυθότα ἐκ τοῦ Θεοῦ OTI) absolutely demands it; those simple impressive repetitions are just in St. John's style. The writer is emphasizing the paramount importance for the Christian faith of outwardly confessing that our Lord Jesus Christ has appeared on earth in the flesh, and he states this first affirmatively and then negatively.

The variant reading is πᾶν πνεῦμα ὃ λύει τὸν Ἰησοῦν, omnis spiritus qui solvit Jesum, "Every spirit that dissolveth Jesus"; this is not found in any extant Greek MS., but is mentioned by the Church historian Socrates (fifth century) as being the reading of the "ancient MSS." in his days (H.E. vii, 32). Writing of Nestorius he says that he was ignorant that the Táλaia ávτíypapa of this passage in St. John's Epistle read πᾶν πνεῦμα ὃ λύει τὸν Ἰησοῦν ἀπὸ τοῦ Θεοῦ οὐκ ἔστι; and he also accuses those who desired to separate the deity from the humanity in Christ (ie., the Nestorians) of removing this thought from their Bibles, and notes that the ancient interpreters were aware of this. Socrates certainly wrote in Greek, but he does not say outright that the reading was found in Greek MSS., and Westcott thinks that he may be referring to some Latin MSS. and Latin commentators. For certainly the Latin evidence for Xúet, solvit, is as strong as the Greek evidence is against it. It is found in Irenæus, Tertullian, the Latin translations of Clement of Alexandria, and of Origen, in Priscillian and in Augustine, and is the Vulgate reading. Here, of course, the sense is different; what is asserted is not the broad fact of the Lord Jesus having appeared on earth in the flesh, but the theological truth of the hypostatic union; to "dissolve Jesus" is to assert that He was not both human and Divine at the same time, so that although He be God and man, yet He is not two but One Christ. Westcott himself seems to think that λύει is an early gloss on μὴ ὁμολόγει ; but I venture to suggest that it may be simply due to a scribe's error (OAYEI for OAOгEI, the scribe's eye having passed over OMHOM from the similarity of the letters).

We now come to cases of definite mistranslation, of actual alteration in the text. Here we must be very cautious in bringing charges against the Vulgate, for two reasons. The : first is that some of the popular charges are wrong, and the second is that our own A.V. is not entirely guiltless. First,

may I remind you of one or two charges brought against the Vulgate, of which it is innocent? There was a popular superstition that the Church of Rome in uneasiness at the open contradiction between the Second Commandment and her own worship of images, had actually removed the Second Commandment from the decalogue. There is this amount of truth in it, that the Second Commandment in the Roman Catholic enumeration is the prohibition against taking Jehovah's name in vain; but this is simply due to a difference of arrangement, whereby our First and Second Commandments are made into one by both Roman Catholics and Lutherans, and the number Ten obtained by splitting the last Commandment into two.

Another instance where I think a charge has been brought against the Vulgate wrongly, is that of the text I Corinthians vi, 20. This is a case of a false reading in the Vulgate, but one which is clearly the result of a scribe's blunder; it has not been introduced to support a doctrine. St. Paul closes the chapter with the exhortation, "Glorify God therefore in your body ”—δοξάσατε δὴ τὸν Θεὸν ἐν τῷ σώματι ὑμῶν. The δοξάσατε δὴ got somehow corrupted into δοξάσατε ἆράγε, and this into δοξάσατε ἄρατε; this was quite naturally translated by "Glorificate et portate"-"Glorify God and carry Him about in your bodies." The best MSS. of the Old Latin do not have it, nor does Irenæus so quote it, nor Jerome (when he refers to the passage in his other works); but a large number of Latin Fathers-Tertullian, Cyprian, Ambrose, Augustine (as a rule) quote it in the longer form, and it is the undoubted Vulgate reading. I have heard it said that this additional clause, "et portate," was claimed by the Roman Church as referring to the Divine Presence received by the Christian in the Eucharist; but I have not yet come across any Latin Father or any Roman Catholic commentator who has employed the text for that purpose; and Dr. Stone, probably the most learned divine we have on that subject, also informs me that he has not come across any instance. We must therefore refrain from making a charge which we cannot prove.

But I have also said that we must not be too severe upon the Vulgate, for our own A.V. is not entirely guiltless in the matter. I need only remind you of the numerous cases in which éπOTρéψωσι, ἐπιστρέψας κ.τ.λ. were translated as passives, “be converted," by the A.V. translators, as their rigid Calvinism would not allow them to grant to the man himself any share in attaining his own salvation (see Matthew xiii, 15; Mark iv, 12; Luke xxii, 32; John xii, 40; Acts iii, 19, xxviii, 27; in all these cases the

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"be converted" of the A.V. has been rightly changed into "turn. again" by the revisers). A still more flagrant case, if I may say so, is the rendering of Hebrews x, 38, o de díkaιós μov ἐκ πίστεως ζήσεται· καὶ ἐὰν ὑποστείληται, οὐκ εὐδοκεῖ ἡ ψυχή μov ev avτ ("my just man shall live by [his] faith; and if he draw back, my soul hath no pleasure in him "). The A.V. translators again were unwilling to assert that anyone who had once been called "just" or "righteous" in the sight of God could ever fall from grace; and so they boldly interpolated the words any man ("if any man draw back, my soul shall have no pleasure in him "), and made the man who drew back a different person from the righteous man, i.e., they altered the Bible to suit their own views. This has, of course, also been corrected

in the R.V.

We now come to some of the cases of deliberate alteration in the Vulgate. The first instance which meets us is that of Genesis iii, 15; there the Clementine edition of 1592-still the standard edition for the whole Roman Church-reads: "Inimicitias ponam inter te et mulierem, et semen tuum et semen illius; ipsa conteret caput tuum, et tu insidiaberis calcaneo eius"; "She shall bruise thy head." The honour is here distinctly referred, not to the woman's seed, but to the woman herself, and so the passage has been naturally referred by Roman Catholic commentators to the Blessed Virgin Mary. But it is a mistranslation. The reference is to the seed of the woman; it should be ipse, not ipsa. When the alteration was made we cannot tell. Augustine, Ambrose, and Gregory the Great apparently read ipsa, but the Old Latin version had ipse, and Vercellone gives a long list of writers who have used the correct word, though some of them have been quoted on the other side.*

Another instance has been brought to our notice since the publication of the R.V. of the Apocrypha in 1895. A striking feature in that revision is the enormous length of the 7th chapter of II Esdras; it runs to 140 verses. The reason is that more than four columns of print in the R.V. are new to us; they were not in the A.V. The transition in that version, as Mr. Bensly pointed out, from the 35th to the 36th verse of

* Variae Lectiones, I, pp. 12, 13.

+ Missing Fragment of the Fourth Book of Ezra, p. 1.

that chapter was so abrupt as to strike even the most superficial reader; 33f. gives an account of the final judgment"The most high shall be revealed upon the seat of judgment and compassion shall pass away and longsuffering shall be withdrawn: (34) but judgment only shall remain, truth shall stand, and faith shall wax strong; (35) and the work shall follow, and the reward shall be shewed, and good deeds shall awake." Verse 36 proceeds with a completely irrelevant question of Esdras to the angel: "And I answered and said, How do we find now that first Abraham prayed for the people of Sodom, and Moses for the fathers that sinned in the wilderness ?" etc. The reason of this abrupt change is that originally a long discussion occurred between Esdras and the angel, at the end of which Esdras asked the angel whether in the day of judgment (verse 102) the just will be able to intercede for the ungodly or to entreat the Most High for them. The angel returns a very decided negative: "Never shall any one pray for another in that day, neither shall one lay a burden on another, for then shall all bear every one his own righteousness or unrighteousness." Such a statement as this did not prove acceptable to some early theologian, and he got out of the difficulty, not by erasing the verse, but by tearing out the whole page which contained the verse. By a strange fate almost all the Latin copies of the 4th Book of Esdras were derived from this mutilated exemplar, and it was not till R. L. Bensly in 1875 published his Missing Fragment of the Fourth Book of Ezra that we realized what we had lost for so many centuries.

Samuel Berger* has shewn by a series of extracts from MSS. of different centuries how the text in II Maccabees xii, 46, with regard to praying for the dead, gradually increased in strength. The first group of MSS. is that of the Old Latin; these reproduce the LXX (B) text, and simply mention with approval the fact that Judas prayed for the dead: "Holy and godly was the thought. Wherefore he made supplication for them that had died, that they might be released from their sin" (Sancta et salubris excogitatio. Ideoque exorabat pro mortuis illis qui peccaverant, ut a peccato solverentur). The Vulgate MSS. of the oldest type alter this a little; it becomes: "Sancta et salubris cogitatio pro defunctis exorare ut a peccato solverentur " ("It was a holy and sound thought to pray for the departed,

* Histoire de la Vulgate pendant les premiers Siècles du Moyen Age, p. 23.

that they might be released from sin "); but the later Vulgate MSS. and the Clementine text turn it into a general rule of faith, not a pious practice on the part of Judas mentioned with praise; it is now "Sancta ergo et salubris est cogitatio pro defunctis exorare ut a peccato solvantur" ("It is a holy and sound thought to pray for the dead, that they may be released from sin ").

I mentioned above that there would occasionally be a play on the words in the original which it might be next to impossible for a translator to reproduce exactly; it must be allowed, however, that Jerome here often had that good luck which only comes to very clever people. In Acts viii, 30, the question to the Ethiopian Eunuch ("understandest thou what thou readest ? ") γινώσκεις ἃ ἀναγινώσκεις goes exactly into Latin "intellegis quae legis," though the similar play in II Corinthians iii, 2, γινωσκομένη καὶ ἀναγινωσκομένη was not reproduced in the Vulgate; Erasmus proposed that it should be translated "quae intellegitur et legitur" (instead of "quae scitur et legitur" of the Vulgate). But in the Old Testament, Jerome cleverly translated Exodus xv, 23, "unde et congruum loco nomen imposuit, vocans illum Mara, id est, amaritudinem"; cf. Ruth i, 20, "Vocate me Mara, id est, Amaram"; also Genesis ii, 23, Virago quoniam de viro sumpta est."

In rendering Hebrew proper names, Jerome shewed greater freedom and common sense than our own translators; he followed the example of the LXX version, which, in the Book of Genesis, regularly interpreted such names. This is quite legitimate, and makes much of the Old Testament more intelligible and living. We may doubt whether the average country congregation is much the wiser for hearing that Abraham called the mountain on which he offered Isaac, "Jehovah-Jireh " (Genesis xxii, 14); but the Vulgate is perfectly intelligible with its "appellavit nomen loci illius, Dominus videt; similarly in Genesis xxxi, 47, the "JegarSahadutha" of the A.V. means nothing to the average layman, while the "tumulum testis" of the Vulgate is quite clear. Elsewhere Jerome made his version more clear to a popular audience by adding the interpretation after the proper name, as e.g., Genesis xxxii, 2, “Mahanaim, id est castra," and Rev. ix, 11, Appolyon, Latine habens nomen Exterminans."

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It may be thought that points of translation like these have little to do with influence on doctrine; but Jerome's