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BIBLICO-THEOLOGICAL LEXICON OF THE GREEK OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.- Licentiate Cremer's conviction is, that the Greek Lexicons of the New Testament heretofore published, overlook too much the “languagemoulding power of Christianity," as Schleiermacher termed it; and his intention is to supplement this lack. Christianity, as the purest spiritual religion, and the Greek language as the organ and reflection of an unusually full and rich, merely natural life, must stand in strong antagonism to each other. Consequently the latter must have undergone great modifications in becoming the dress of the former. The author wishes to bring this clearly out. He has been working nine years at his book. The words are not arranged alphabetically, but according to derivation and composition. An excellent feature of the present attempt is, that the passages referred to, both in the classics, in the Septuagint, in the Apocrypha, and in the New Testament, are mostly adduced in full; a sign that the author has worked for himself; for nothing is easier than to pile up a heap of second-hand references. The print is very clear; the form is octavo; the whole will contain from five hundred to six hundred pages. So far as we have been able to examine, the treatment of the words seems to be natural and careful. The author's theological position would seem to be that of an orthodox, but mild Lutheran.

ARTICLE X.

NOTICES OF RECENT PUBLICATIONS.

DR. JAMES FREEMAN CLARKE ON ORTHODOXY.

"Soleo enim in aliena castra transire, non tanquam transfuga, sed tanquam explorator' (Seneca, Epistolae, 2). Fiat lux. Cupio refelli, ubi aberrârim; nihil majus, nihil aliud quam veritatem efflagito' (Thomas Burnet, Arch. Phil.)." These are the two mottoes prefixed to this able volume. Its author says: "The peculiarity of the book now offered to the religious public by the government of the American Unitarian Association, is this that it is an honest attempt to find and state the truth contained in the doctrines of their opponents. It is, perhaps, something new for an

1 Biblisch-theologisches Wörterbuch der neutestamentlichen Gräecität. Von Lic. Hermann Cremer. Gotha: F. A. Perthes; London: Asher and Co., Trübner and Co. 1866. First Half. Price, 1 thaler, 10 sgr.

2 Orthodoxy; its Truths and Errors. By James Freeman Clarke. 12mo. pp. 512. Boston: American Unitarian Association; Walker, Fuller, and Co.; New York: James Miller. 1866.

association established to defend certain theological opinions, and baptized with a special theological name, to publish a work intended to do justice to hostile theories. The too usual course of each sect has been, through all its organs, to attack, denounce, undervalue, and vilify the positions taken by its antagonists. This has been considered as only an honest zeal for truth. The consequence has been, that no department of literature has been so unchristian in its tone and temper as that of sectarian controversy. Political journals heap abuse on their opponents, in the interest of their party. But though more noisy than the theological partisans, they are by no means so cold, hard, or unrelenting. Party spirit, compared with sectarian spirit, seems rather mild" (pp. 1, 2). "We stand in the Unitarian position, but shall endeavor to see if there be not some truths in Orthodoxy which Unitarians have not yet adequately recognized. To use the language of our motto -we come 'not as deserters, but as explorers,' into the camp of Orthodoxy. We are satisfied with our Unitarian position, as a stand-point from which to survey that of others. And especially are we grateful to it, since it encourages us by all its traditions, by all its ideas and principles, to look after as well as before-to see if there be there no truth behind us which we have dropped in our hasty advance, as well as truth beyond us to which we have not yet attained" (pp. 2, 3).

We find in this volume many candid admissions, many luminous statements, many forcible paragraphs. We see no evidence of intentional unfairness or of designed misrepresentation. Dr. Clarke, however, cannot expect that the Orthodox divines will be satisfied with all his portraiture of their system. We think that he has unintentionally omitted some explanations which should have been inserted, and unintentionally added some representations which should have been omitted. We think also that he has proposed some mediating theories which are very far from any true medium between the Orthodox and Unitarian theories.

Without attempting a thorough review of his volume, let us first glance at his fourth chapter, entitled "Truths and errors as regards miracles."

The great question respecting a miracle is whether it be wrought by the immediate and mere volition of God, interposing and violating the laws of created nature, as they are viewed in their established method of operation, or whether it be wrought by some force and law in created nature without any immediately interposed volition of God, or without any other divine volition than that which sustains created nature with its forces and laws.

We do not say with M. Renan that the biblical miracles are "special interventions, like that of a clock-maker putting his fingers in to remedy the defects of his wheels," for it is not a defect in the physical laws that they are interferred with by their preserver; it is rather a designed excellence in them and in their relation to God that they can be thus interferred with. Neither do we merely say, with a critic of M. Renan (Edinburgh Review, No. 254, p. 461), that miracles are "the arrange

ments by which, at crossing-places in their orbits, man's world is met and illuminated by phenomena belonging to another zone, and moving in another plane"; for we believe that if there be no immediate intervention of God, there are no miracles, and if the raising of the dead be analogous to the approach of a comet, then the raising of the dead is nothing supernatural, and is no proof of a supernatural religion. But we do say that a miracle is such an interposition of the divine will as could not be foreseen or calculated upon by any observer, however intelligent and sagacious, of the forces and laws of the natural world.

The theory that a miracle demands no direct interposition of the Creator's will, is illustrated in a passage quoted by Dr. Clarke on pp. 64, 65: "A story is told of a clock, on one of the high cathedral towers of the older world, so constructed that at the close of a century it strikes the years as it ordinarily strikes the hours. As a hundred years come to a close, suddenly, in the immense mass of complicated mechanism, a little wheel turns, a pin slides into the appointed place, and in the shadows of the night the bell tolls a requiem over the generations which during a century have lived and labored and been buried around it. One of these generations might live and die, and witness nothing peculiar. The clock would have what we call an established order of its own; but what should we say when, at the midnight which brought the century to a close, it sounded over the sleeping city, rousing all to listen to the world's age? Would it be a violation of law? No; only a variation of the accustomed order, produced by the intervention of a force always existing, but never appearing in this way till the appointed moment had arrived. The tolling of the century would be a variation from the observed order of the clock; but to an artist, in constructing it, it would have formed a part of that order. So a miracle is a variation of the order of nature as it has appeared to us; but to the Author of nature it was a part of that predestined order - a part of that order of which he is at all times the immediate Author and Sustainer; miraculous to us, seen from our human point of view, but no miracle to God; to our circumscribed vision a violation of law, but to God only a part in the great plan and progress of the law of the universe" (Ephraim Peabody).

The theory of Dr. Clarke is thus stated: "I. There is in man a power, as yet undeveloped, and only occasionally seen in exceptional conditions, of overcoming the common laws of nature by force of will; and this is sometimes voluntary, and sometimes involuntary.

II. This phenomenon takes these forms: A. Power of the soul over the body (a.) to resist pain, as in the case of martyrs, who are burned alive without any appearance of suffering; (b.) to resist physical injury, as in the case of the Convulsionists; (c.) to dispense with the usual service of the senses, as in the case of the girl at Worcester Insane Asylum, Massachu setts, under the care of Dr. Woodward, who could read a book in a per

fectly dark room and with bandaged eyes; (d.) to give a preternatural energy and strength to the body. B. Preternatural knowledge — such cases as that narrated by Dr. Bushnell, of Yonnt, in California; or knowledge through dreams, waking presentiments; cases of foresight, or prophecy; of insight, or knowledge of what is passing in other minds; of clairvoyance, or knowledge of what is happening at a distance, of which multitudes of facts are narrated in such books as the "Seeress of Provorst," Mrs. Crowe's "Night Side of Nature," Robert Dale Owen's "Footfalls from the Boundary of the Unseen World," which, after being sifted by a fair criticism, will leave a large residuum of irresolvable facts. C. Higher than these is a preternatural elevation of the whole character, as in such cases as that of Joan of Arc, where a young girl, ignorant, a peasant, destitute of all common means of influencing any one, by the simple power of faith, because she believed herself inspired and commissioned, succeeded in gaining the command of the armies of France, and then of achieving a series of victories, equal, on the whole, as mere military exploits, to those of the first captains of the world.

In all these cases we see manifestations of a power in the soul over nature, body, men, and the laws of time and space. So we say, secondly: III. This power was possessed in the highest degree known in this world by Jesus of Nazareth, and it differed in him from these other cases in these points: 1. It was always voluntary in its exercise, never involuntary. He was not possessed by it, he possessed it. He used it just when and where he chose to use it. It was always at his command; he never appears to have tried to work a miracle, and failed. So, 2. It was in him constant, and not occasional. In other cases where the miraculous element appears, it seems to come and go; but to Jesus the spirit was not given by measure. He had it always. 3. This power in him was total, and not partial. It was therefore harmonious-in harmony with all his other qualities. He had power over diseases of the body, and also those of the soul. He knew what was in man, and what was in nature—in the present and in the future. There was nothing ecstatic, enthusiastic, nothing of excitement, about him; but everything denoted a fulness, a pleroma, of this spiritual life. 4. The exercise of this power in Christ was always eminently moral, never wilful. The one or two seeming exceptions, as, for example, the cursing the fig-tree, and the causing the evil spirits to go into the swine, ought to be explained in harmony with the vast majority of his actions, which always are guided by love and justice and a holy sense of what is true and good. 5thly, and lastly. The miracle power of Jesus reached a higher point of development than in any one else. The raising of the dead to life, and the mysterious power over nature indicated by the turning of water into wine, by the miracle of the loaves and fishes, calming the storm, if facts, are facts unparalleled in any other biography, but seem possible, however unintelligible, when considered as emanating from such a masterly and commanding spirit as that of Jesus" (pp. 78-80).

The miracle of the resurrection of Jesus is explained by Dr. Clarke in this manner: "But perhaps, after all, the resurrection may have been an example of a universal law. Like other miracles, which are sporadic instances, in this world, of laws which may be the nature of other worlds, so the resurrection may have been as natural an event as any other in the life of Jesus. Perhaps it is a law of nature that all souls shall become disengaged from the earthly body on the third day after death. Perhaps they all rise in a spiritual body, substantial and real, but not usually perceptible by the senses. Perhaps, in the case of Jesus, that same superior command of miraculous force which appeared during his life enabled him to show himself easily and freely whenever he would. What became of the earthly body we do not know; it may have been removed by the priests or soldiers to prevent the disciples from getting possession of it. The body in which Christ appeared differed evidently from the earthly body in various ways. It came and went mysteriously; it was sometimes recognized, and sometimes not; and it ascended into the spiritual world instead of passing again to death and the grave. Perhaps, therefore, it may be a universal law that souls rise out of the material body into a higher state, clothed in another body, substantial and real, but not material. The essence of the resurrection is this: resurrection is not coming to life again with the same body, but ascent into a higher life with a new body" (pp. 83, 84).

The final result of Dr. Clarke's examination is given thus: "1. We may believe, on the testimony of history, that through Jesus of Nazareth there entered the world a great impulse of creative moral life, which has been, and is now, renewing society. This new impulse of life may be regarded as miraculous or supernatural. 2. We may believe, though perhaps less strongly, but still decidedly, that during the stay of Jesus on earth many extraordinary phenomena took place, such as the sudden healing of the sick, the raising of the dead to life, a display of miraculous insight and foresight, or knowledge of the present and the future, and some influence over organic and material life, and over the lifeless forces of nature. The precise limits of this we do not know, and need not pretend to define. We need not think it essential to fix the boundary. It may be interesting as speculation, but it is not important as religion. 3. For, in the third place, we may say that these miracles of Jesus have very little direct bearing on our religion. As they illustrate his character, they are valuable, and also as they help us to believe that the laws of nature are not stiff and rigid, like the movement of a machine, but that there is force above force, a vortex of living powers, in the universe, rising higher and higher towards the fountain of all force and life in God. All portents and wonders are useful, as they shake us out of the mechanical view of things, and show that even the outward, sensible world is full of spiritual power. 4. We may also believe the miracles of Jesus to be natural in this sense —

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