he wishes to err, must place all Scripture before his eyes, and compare contraries, and like the two cherubim which confronted each other, he must find unanimity in the midst of the mercy-seat; otherwise the countenance of each cherub will divert the eye which follows it far from the mercy-seat, that is from the true understanding of Christ."

9. Luther's main principle in studying the Old Testament was to find Christ everywhere. "Tolle Christum e Scripturis quid amplius in illis invenies?" "The end of the Law," says Flacius, "is Christ; He alone is the pearl we must find.”1 Here are some of his maxims :

"If our opponents urge Scripture against Christ, we urge Christ against Scripture."

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'Scripture must be referred to Christ or cannot be held as true Scripture." "Keep the commandments" should be interpreted to mean "Keep them in Christ, or in the faith of Christ." "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God," i.e. in Christ and his faith. "Do this and thou shalt live," i.e. do it in Me, or thou wilt not do it, or wilt do the reverse. "Redeem thy sins by alms," 2 i.e. in the faith of Christ, "otherwise thy alms will be a sin." 3

Here again there is a truth which is indistinctly stated and may lead to great confusion. Homiletically it is perfectly correct; but exegetically this reading of Christian dogmatics between the lines of Jewish writings may only become (as it did become) another phase of unreality and scholasticism. It may be morally permissible, but it can only be historically false and misleading, to give to Genesis the meaning of the Apocalypse, and to the Canticles that of the first Epistle of St. John. It caused the radical defect of Luther's exegesis-its perpetual tendency to dogma

1 Flacius, Clavis S.S., p. 7.

2 "Redime peccata tua eleemosynis," Dan. iv. 26. A.V. "Break off thy sins by righteousness."

3 "Wir erleuchten die alte heilige Schrift durch das Evangelium." Werke, iv. 1728.

VOL. VII.

Q

and controversy in treating of passages where the dogma is only subjective and arbitrary, and the polemic has no fair excuse. A commentary on the Old Testament is not a reasonable place for incessant attacks on monkery, or arguments in favour of Justification by Faith. When Luther reads the Trinity and the Incarnation in passages written a thousand years before the Christian era, and—in a spirit worthy of Rabbi Akhiva himself-infers the Divinity of the Messiah, and even the communicatio idiomatum from the particle in Gen. iv. 1, we see that his conceptions of the due treatment of the Old Testament differ seriously from ours. Luther finds traces of the Trinity in Gen. i. 26, iii. 21, xi. 7-9; Num. vi. 22; 2 Sam. xxiii. 2, etc.; and Immortality in Gen. ii. 7. Like Augustine he will admit any interpretation "modo pia sit." He deliberately adopts the principles which a thousand years earlier had, with deeper insight and more candid wisdom, been deliberately rejected by Theodore of Mopsuestia and the School of Antioch. He here fails to follow the rule of Hilary, which he praises: "Optimus interpres hic est qui sensum e Scriptura potuis retulerit quam attulerit, nec cogat hoc in doctu contentum videre, quod ante intelligentiam docere præsumserit." 1 It must then be admitted that Luther in his comment upon Genesis adds little or nothing to Nicolas de Lyra except the dogmatic treatment of patriarchal history.2

10. We may remark that the bold attitude of Luther towards certain parts of Scripture-such as the Epistles of St. Jude and St. James, the Epistle to the Hebrews, and the Revelation of St. John-and generally speaking that manly independence 3 which has led to the stigma that

1 Fabricius, 1. c. i. 72.

2 Siegfried, über Raschi's Einfluss auf Lira und Luther. Merx, Archiv., vol. i. p. 432. To the last Luther disliked Lyra's use of Jewish interpreters.

3 See his Prefaces to the Epistles of James and Jude, and 1 Peter. In the former he says, "Was Christum nicht lehret das ist noch nicht apostolisch wenn es gleich St. Petrus oder St. Paulus lehrete." The very interesting passages are

he is the founder of modern rationalism, arose from his conviction of the truth of this exegetic principle. It led with perfect honesty, to the very results which are most distasteful to those who have most warmly adopted it. He held it a matter of no importance whether Moses had written the Pentateuch or not. He has little to say of Esther. He says that Ezra "estherissat et mordochissat." If Scripture be of little or no value except so far as it bears on one special doctrine, Luther's free expression of indifference towards certain parts of Scripture which did not honestly admit of such application became a logical necessity. When controversialists urged the Epistle of St. James against the doctrine of Justification by Faith, he told them that it was their way "to quote some single text and then set their horns against all Scripture." His views were more or less shared by the Magdeburg Centuriators, Melancthon, and even Caietan. He failed indeed to realize the complexity, the fragmentariness, the multiformity of Scripture as a whole, but we must set it down as one of his highest merits, that on his estimate of what the Canon ought to be, "he sought for the Canon in the Canon," and was not carried away by the “ 'subjective idolism" and slavish superstition which treats all parts of Scripture as though they were of equal importance and were in every word and letter written by the finger of God. He shewed his courage and insight and his superiority to the popular ideas of his day by giving to the phrase "the collected in Reuss, Heilige Schriften, N. T., vol. iv. p. 65. Luther's prefaces are collected by Walch in the fourteenth volume. Luther recognised the subjectivity of his views, and did not wish to force them on others. See Tischreden (Erl. Ausg. vol. lxii. p. 128, vol. lxiii. p. 35).

The first to make this charge was Krause, Opusc., p. 199. Keim, Jesus of Nazara, vol. i. p. 142 (E. T.), calls Luther “the most radical critic of the free Church of the Reformation." Luther puts James, Jude, Hebrews, and Revelation at the end of his Bible, and does not even number them. He says of the Revelation, "Mein Geist kann sich in das Buch nicht schicken, und ist mir die Ursach genug dass ich sein nicht hoch achte das Christus drinnen weder gelehrt noch erkannt wird."

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THE DAYS OF ENOS.

GENESIS iv. 26.

No one can read the fourth chapter of Genesis carefully without being arrested by the statement in the twenty-sixth verse: "And to Seth, to him also there was born a son; and he called his name Enos: then began men to call upon the name of the Lord." These last words are significant, φωνάντα συνετοίσιν, as the Greeks would call them. writer clearly attached some considerable importance to the fact which he has thus preserved, although what its precise meaning may be it is somewhat difficult to discover. To this question I propose to address myself in the present

paper.

The

For the rendering of the English version there is much to be urged. Not only is it an easy and natural translation of the Hebrew words, but it has also large support from the ancient versions. The rendering of the Septuagint, οὗτος ἤλπισεν ἐπικαλεῖσθαι τὸ ὄνομα Κυρίου τοῦ Θεοῦ, may be dismissed at once as incorrect, having arisen from a confusion of the verb khalal (b) with yakhal (1) to hope." The Greek version of Aquila improves upon this by translating the clause, τότε ἤρχθη τοῦ καλεῖν ἐν ὀνόματι Κυρίου. Το the same effect is that of Symmachus, τότε ἀρχὴ ἐγένετο. Thus both of these agree with the Authorized Version, which has, further, the support of the Syriac; while the Samaritan Pentateuch and the Latin of Jerome differ only in assigning a definite person to the verb, making it refer to Enos: "Iste cœpit invocare nomen Domini" (Vulgate). In spite however of this formidable array of authorities, I think that the rendering is not absolutely beyond question. One school of interpreters has for the most part withheld its consent, and that is one to which we should naturally attach great weight, viz.

the Jewish. The Targums and many Jewish Rabbis of later date agree in rejecting the ordinary rendering, and in supporting an alternative which will presently be offered to the reader's consideration. But, before passing on to this, a few words may be devoted to the discussion of the meaning of the phrase, "to call upon the name of the Lord." It is not one of common occurrence. We meet with it next in the history of Abraham, where it stands in the following passages: (Gen. xii. 8) "There he builded an altar unto the Lord, and called upon the name of the Lord"; (xiii. 4) "The place of the altar, which he had made there at the first: and there Abram called on the name of the Lord"; (xxi. 33) "And Abraham planted a grove [rather, a tamarisk] in Beersheba, and called there on the name of the Lord, the everlasting God." Once it is used of Isaac: (Chap. xxvi. 25) "And he builded an altar there, and called upon the name of the Lord." Beyond these passages it is not found in the Pentateuch; and in the later books, in the few passages in which it occurs, it has lost that technical and definite meaning which belongs to it in the history of the Patriarchs (See 1 Kings xviii. 24; 2 Kings v. 11; Joel ii. 32; Zeph. iii. 9; Ps. cxvi. 4, 13, 17). In Genesis it is manifestly used of solemn and formal worship. In three out of the four instances cited from the Patriarchal history it stands in close connection with the mention of an altar. In the fourth it is connected with the planting of a tree, an act which from the manner in which it is narrated we should gather to have been a solemn and religious one.

Of this definite and formal worship of God the passage which we have been considering gives us (according to the ordinary interpretation) the origin and commencement. Then began men to call upon the name of the Lord. "We have here," says Keil, "an account of the commencement of that worship of God which consists in prayer, praise,