splendid experiment of Christian zeal has been attended with a success which confirms the assurance that its purpose will be accomplished in giving the word of God to the human race. Vast as is the design, every year utters more distinctly the prophecy of its fulfillment. The astronomer, from a known section of the pathway of a new planet, can describe its entire orbit, and its time of revolving, even to a day; so, in the progress this great institution has made within the last fifty years, there may be found the pledge that its destiny will be carried out, and even the elements that may serve in calculating the period when the consummation shall be gained.

DR. CLARKE was one of a long succession of men who, in every age of the Christian Church, have applied the best energies of their intellect and heart to the study and interpretation of the Scriptures of truth. Regarding the Holy Bible as an authenticated revelation from God to mankind, the immutable canon of their duty, the Gospel of their redemption from sin and perdition, and the covenant charter of their hope of everlasting life, they have made it the grand business of their lives to lay open its mines of wisdom, for the edification of the Church in her holy faith, and the conversion of the world to God.

A volume which enshrines the thoughts of an infinite Intelligence, and bears relation not only to the concerns of human life in the remotest past, but to its destinies in the endless future, may well awaken the earnest scrutiny of the wisest and most thoughtful of mankind. Nor, when we consider the peculiar character of its contents, and the circumstances of time, locality, and language in which it was written, need we be surprised that so much resolute labor has been needed for the satisfactory explication of many of its parts. Let us rather be thankful that these attempts have been so well sustained, and crowned with such measures of success, that the holy Book may now be read in so many of the languages of our race, and understood by all who are willing to be made wise.

One result of these persevering studies has been to fix the principles on which the Bible may be truly expounded. Severe investigation and careful experiment have reduced those principles to a well defined system, designated in

technical phrase the science of Hermeneutics or Exegesis.* But the present comparatively satisfactory state of this science has been, like most other human attainments, arrived at by slow and laborious approaches.

Though the written word of God had its public interpreters in the Old Testament time, we have no monuments of their labors except the version of the Septuaginta, completed about 140 B.C.; the Aramaic Targum of Onkelos on the Pentateuch, and of Yonáthan ben Uzziel on the Prophets, executed somewhere toward the opening of the Gospel dispensation: the Septuagint being in general a grammatical translation of the Hebrew Bible, and the Targums a tolerably close paraphrase in the vernacular of Palestine at that time. In these productions we have, no doubt, an embodi ment of the expository ideas propounded in the synagogue by the Meturgemanin, or official interpreters of the Hebrew text, who, ever since the days of Ezra, had accompanied the Sabbath readings of Moses and the Prophets with such oral translations as would make them intelligible to the people. To these we may add the fanciful expositions of Philo, the Alexandrian Jew, and the more substantial but often random explanations of Joseph ben Mattathja, in his work on the Antiquities of the Jews. In the Mishna, too, and subsequently in the Talmud, (works which were elaborated in the first five centuries of the Christian era,) a multitude of Biblical texts are expounded with various degrees of correctness or absurdity. So, also, in the books called Sifra, Sifree, and Mekilta, we have commentaries on the Pentateuch, and in the Boraitha of Rabbi Eleazor an exposition of various historial portions of the Old Testament.

But the first among the known Jewish authors who is worthy of the name of a professed commentator, is Saadya the Gaon, president of the Rabbinical College at Sora, in Babylonia, in the tenth century. He translated the Pentateuch into Arabic without notes, but wrote commentaries on

* If scienticfially distinguished, hermeneutics are the theory of interpretation; exegesis, interpretation in its practical exercise.

the Psalms, Canticles, Job, and Daniel.

He was followed

in the same labors by Hai Gaon, in the same century; by Tobia ben Eliezer, Salomo Jizhaki, (or Rashi,) Abraham ibn Ezra, Moses bar Nachman, and Moses ben Maimun, in the twelfth; in the thirteenth, by Simeon Haddarshan, (the compiler of the Yalkut, so often quoted by Dr. Clarke, a collection, as the word means, a repertory, or thesaurus, comprising in a stout folio the substance of the preceding commentators,) by Moses and David Kimchi, whose grammatical scholia are of great value in the study of the Hebrew Bible; and by Levi ben Gershom, or Banola, who supplemented the literal exposition of the text with suitable moral applications. These, with Don Isaac Abravanel in the fifteenth century, are the principal of a multitude of Jewish expositors, whose works, however worthy of examination, repose from age to age in slumbers but very rarely disturbed.*

Among these Hebrew commentators there are four methods of interpretation. Some unfold the simple or literal meaning; others advance from the literal to the allegorical, and consider the letter of the document as the signature or indication of a higher and more spiritual teaching. Others, again, bring to their aid the mythical apparatus of the Medrashim, and crowd their pages with the legends and sagas of the Hagadoth; while a fourth class, disdaining all these lower modes of exegesis, seek the transcendental regions of the Kabbala.

The first of these four modes of interpretation is called by the Rabbins the Derek Peshet, or simple way; the second, Remez, or intimation, suggestion as to meaning; the third, Derush, or illustrative exposition; the fourth, Sod, the drawing out of latent mystical significations. They contract these four terms into a technical one, composed of the initials, PaRaDiSe.

Principles nearly similar are developed in the early commentaries of the Christian Church. While Irenæus adhered to the simple method, Origen, Clement, and others adopted * See Etheridge's "Jerusalem and Tiberias," pp. 400-422.

three modes of exposition-the grammatical, anagogical, and allegorical. The learned catechist of Alexandria held that Scripture had a threefold sense, answering to the trinal elements of human nature: the grammatical, owμatikòç= the body; the moral, vxıкòç—soul; the mystical, πvɛvpatikos spirit. The excesses of Origen's disciples gave way afterward to the more severe method of the Antiochian school, under Diodorus of Tarsus, and Theodore of Mopsuestia; men who were too much disposed to exaggerate on the opposite side, and indulge in a frigid, rationalistic exposition of the Scriptures: while Chrysostom, Theodoret, Jerome, and Augustine preferred the via media.

In the Middle Ages, when the study of the Hebrew and Greek originals of the Bible had been almost forgotten, some of the schoolmen, in their interpretations of the Vulgate, closely followed the traditions of the Church, while others. launched upon the ocean of allegorical fancy. Some held that in Scripture there was a threefold sense-the literal, the spiritual, and the moral;* others, a fourfold sensehistorical, allegorical, tropological, and anagogical; † yet others, a sevenfold sense-historical, allegorical, intermediate, tropical, parabolical, Christological, moral; † nay, others, an eightfold sense-literal, allegorical or parabolical, tropological or etymological, anagogical or analogical, typical or exemplary, anaphorical or proportional, mystical or apocalyptical, Boarcademical or primordial; and, to crown all, others, an infinite sense; § thus giving the interpreter space and verge enough to range wherever the wings of imagination might bear him.

By reverting to these things, which is like glancing into a dark and roaring vortex, we become the more sensible of the great advantages which the Church now possesses in those surer principles of interpretation which have been carried with increasing effect into their practical results since the time of the Reformation. At that great epoch the

*Paschasius Radbert.

Angelom.

+Rabanus Maurus, Victor de St. Hugo. John Scotus Erigena.