(even when I conceive myself lawfully called to it), without suffering some loss, and feeling coldness and backwardness contracted to better things. you favour me with of the company you most prefer at P -, answers, as the impression to the seal, to the idea I had formed of them. One of them is an infidel in principle, though his politeness restrains him from saying what he thinks. I could, for your sake, almost wish he were not so polite: then, perhaps, his sentiments might disgust you, and put you more upon your guard against him. But even But even the other gentlemen, if they have no more to recommend them than that they are decent, and dislike the system which opposes revealed religion, do not appear to me to deserve the epithet of perfectly innocent company. Indeed, the expression, perfectly innocent, rather startled me. It is a phraseology which neither you nor I have formerly been accustomed to. Alas! what can we find that is perfectly innocent in itself in a sinful world, or that can be so to us while we are sinners ourselves? I do not wish you to turn recluse, to seclude yourself absolutely from such company: it may be proper, it may be necessary, that you should be sometimes with them; but if it be not rather a cross than a pleasure to be much with them-if their delicacy, politeness, and good sense, can make you any tolerable amends for the want of spiritual conversation-then I must fear that their conversation is rather hurtful than innocent. I am of opinion, that what the world calls respectable, amiable people, are often the most dangerous company Christians can keep. The dissolute and openly profane shock us, and constrain our thoughts to flee to the Saviour of our souls; but there is something in the conversation of the polished and agreeable (if they cannot talk with us about Him, or things relating to Him), which strangely steals away our hearts from Him, and assimilates us insensibly to their spirit. For myself, I know that I seldom spend a few hours in such society" "That amongst those who bear the name of religious professors there should be some who are but pretenders, we are taught to expect. It has been so from the beginning, But I would hope all the professors of religion at Pare not of this cast, so that you can find none deserving of your notice and acquaintance. Indeed, some of the best of them have not the advantage of a liberal education or fine abilities; yet in the scriptural sense, those who are taught of God are all persons of good understanding, and have a superior knowledge, which cannot be acquired in any other school. There are none, however, without their incidental faults and blemishes. An attention to what passes in our own hearts disposes us to make candid allowances for human infirmities; for we have all something which makes us debtors to the candour of others. There is a danger in beholding the faults of professors with too strict a scru tiny: it furnishes our enemy with an occasion of raising surmises in our mind against religion itself. When the weakness of sincere. persons is contrasted with the adroit behaviour of many who are chargeable with little more than that they live without God in the world, if our spirits are not simply dependent upon the Lord, and our spiritual senses are not kept in lively exercise, we are prone to think too favourably of the latter, and to admit undue prejudices against the former. And I am ready to consider itas a symptom of some tendency to a decline in the spiritual life, when I see any person of a religious character pleading the miscarriages of professors, in justification of their freely associating with those who make no pretences at all to religion. "Excuse me, my dear madam, If I had less regard for you, I could have written in a different manner. Perhaps my fears are groundless: and you, who ought to be the best judge in your own concerns, may be right and I mistaken, so far as we differ. However, as you are encompassed with people from whom you may daily hear handsome things, it may not, I hope, do you any harm if you continue to permit me to be rather officious and importunate now and then in expressing my well-meant fears. My heart desires your prosperity. But I know you cannot be happy in any other path than in the good old way of simplicity, self denial, and separation from the world, which has been so often the subject of our conversation. It is likewise my prayer, that you may not only be safe, but exemplary; a burning and shining light in the view of sinners, a friend and patroness of that cause which, bowever slighted now, will be found, in the day of our Saviour's appearing, to have been well worth espousing. May I not hope the Lord had some important service for you, when he sent you so far from home? Our continuance in this world is uncertain, and cannot be very long. Happy they, who while they do live have the honour of being instrumental in diffusing the savour of His Name in their connections." "Your last letter began with an apology. If you thought it necessary, you have a right to expect in return that my answer, so long delayed, should be all apology from beginning to end. But I shall wave all the pleas I might derive from business, from indolence, from the insensible lapse of time, and twenty such topics which offer themselves, and shall proceed to thank you for yours, and to assure you that I continue to set a high value upon your friendship and Mr. W's, notwithstanding my silence seems to make so much against me. 1 t "Our history, since I wrote last, has been very uniform. New mercies and comforts have been afforded us every day; and some trials have been occasionally interwoven with them. But these have been comparatively few and light. I have no reason to adopt the Apostle's words, that "we have been pressed above measure, beyond strength, so as to despair even of life." Yet, had this been our lot, we could have no right to complain-for we are sinners: we therefore have great reason to admire the Lord's tender and merciful dealings with us. **** is still very affectionate and obedient to us. She loves the ordinances of religion, has a tenderness of conscience, and is at intervals very serious and thoughtful. I sometimes feel a little concern in anticipating the season, now not very distant, when she will begin to be thought, and, perhaps, to think herself→→ a woman. A young person coming forward into life, in such a world as this, without experience, appears to me an object of pity. In the last letter I wrote to her, I compared her to a ship I lately saw launched; so gay, so smart, that by looking at her you might be sure she had never been tossed upon the sea, nor encountered a single storm. But she was not launched to lie always in port. She must ere long traverse the ocean; and what enemies, tempests, rocks, and shoals, may endanger her safety before she returns to port, or whether she may return to port at all, who can tell! Such a sea is the world :-it sometimes, to those who are beginning to venture upon it, shews a smooth and smiling face; but when they are embarked on it beyond recal, what changes do they often meet with! Ah, my.. dear madam, my poor except the Lord is pleased to visit her with his light and grace, will soon be like a ship in a storm, without rudder or anchor, com pass or pilot! But I hope he will take charge of her: then she will be safe, and, in defiance of winds and weather, arrive at last, at the desired haven. I have often committed her to his care, and I hope he will give her grace to commit herself to him. Excuse this little unforeseen digression, and assist me with your prayers for her, and I will try to repay you in kind, in behalf of your beloved Joseph, for whom in a course of years you will perhaps have some anxieties to feel. "As the Lord has called me to the honour and the important service of preaching his good Gospel, and is pleased to make me in some measure useful, I ought to be thankful that my life is prolonged; and I am afraid inferior attachments have some influence in making me too well reconciled to the thought of continuing here. Yet upon the whole, and in my better judgment, I think I grow more out of conceit with the world, and more deeply convinced that it is not, cannot be my rest. The scenes of bus'ness tell me what is In one view, it is a place for lunatics; in another, an hospital. Madness or misery surround me wherever I cast my eyes. I pity the poor, the oppressed, the suffering part: but the gay, the busy part I pity much more. I pity statesmen, generals, and kings, with all their pomp and power, and the pretended importance of their councils and designs in my view, they are no better employed or amused than lunatics. I pity philosophers and people of taste and genius, if they have not a taste for the Gospel. Alas, what will a collection of coins, or fossils, or butterflies do for them when they are about to leave all behind! Or what will the knowledge of stars and eclipses avail the man who at death will be plunged into outer darkness! I pity the fluttering, sing-song pleasure-loving tribe: their joy, such as it is, is transitory, like "the crackling of thorns under a pot:" they must soon lie down in sorrow. Think not that I am a misanthrope: I love my fellow-creatures; and it is because I love them I pity them. I grieve to see them serious in trifles, and trifling or stupid with respect to the things of the utmost importance. "But I do not pity those who know and love our Saviour. Though they may be poor, sick, afflicted, despised, or oppressed, I hardly know how to pity them, when I compare their present sufferings with the glory that is preparing for 'hem— or the term of their sufferings with the eternity in which they will be happy. Should I sympathize with them when I see them werp, I must at the same time congratulate them that the Lord himself will shortly wipe all tears from their eyes. Then shall they shine like the sun in their Father's kingdom. "Oh, madam, if our Saviour be so great and so good-if be so loved us, if he really sweat blood in Gethsemane, and hung in ago nies upon the cross, and all for us -then what a pity, what a shame is it, that He should be so often out of our thoughts, so seldom the subject of our conversation; that we should be sometimes ashamed or half ashamed to own an attachment to him, and sometimes at a loss whether to obey the world or him But, indeed, such is the evil, the ingratitude, the vileness of the human heart, that after we have seen his glory, and felt his power, and heard his voice, and tasted his goodness, we are in danger of forgetting him. But may the Lord forbid! Rather may we forget our names, our food—rather let our right-hand forget its cunning, and our tongue cleave to the roof of our mouth, than that we should forget him." (To be continued.) point after that word in Bell's 12mo To the Editor of the Christian Observer. Bible, Lond. 1686; in Field's 4to, THUS the passage is usually pointed in our common Bibles, with only a colon at the end of the seventh verse; which confirms the notion entertained by many persons, that the Apostle's meaning is, that Jesus Christ was "the end of these persons' conversation," or the scope at which they aimed, the object for which they lived. ("To me to live is Christ.") But the original will admit of no such interpretation, however agreeable it may be to the general analogy of Scripture and the faith. 1. The word is exact, outgoing, issue, close: "The close of their conversation on earth." Whitby. It is rendered " way of escape," in the only other passage of the New Testament where it occurs; 1 Cor. x. 13. 2. The words "Jesus Christ," are not in the right case to be in apposition with Exarv: in the nominative instead of the accusative. 3. The order of the words destroys such a supposition. It is this: "Considering the end of whose conversation, follow their faith. Jesus Christ," &c. Perhaps it might be added, that ver. 8. connects much better with ver. 9. than with ver. 7. "Jesus Christ (is) the same yesterday, today, and for ever: be not carried about with divers and strange doctrines." Accordingly our Greek Testaments place a full point at the end of the seventh verse; nor do I remember to have seen any English edition, a hundred years old, stopped otherwise. There is a full CHRIST. OBSERV. No. 192. Camb. 1666; and in the original folio of the present version, printed by Barker, in 1611. The colon after the word "conversation" is un innovation. J. S-. H. P.S. May not the verb is be properly supplied as above after "Jesus Christ," so as to make the sentence complete? The sense will then be regular and coherent. The Apostle will appear to be advising the Hebrews to follow and emulate the faith of their ministers; the sum and substance of whose preaching was Jesus Christ, who is the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever. The subsequent exhortation to consistency and steadiness of doctrine thus comes in with great force and propriety. To the Editor of the Christian Observer. IN lately looking through your Number for March of the present year, my attention was attracted by a letter on the fourteenth verse of the twenty-second chapter of Genesis. The writer begins by saying, that every attentive reader of the Old Testament must have been struck by the obscurity of the passage. I never before met with a grammatical explanation of it; but it appears to me that a consciousness of the high import of the event then shadowed forth, and a knowledge of the style and genius of the Hebrew language, must have the effect of removing all obscurity from that verse. I will begin by acknowledging the truth of the writer's assertion as to the meaning of D, but not as to the remark upon it, which is thus expressed :-"I would also observe, also observe, that the word of the original is translated in a manner altogether upwarranted. □ must always mean this day' or 'to-day; and if the 5 H author of the Book of Genesis had intended to say to this day,' he "להירם would have written , it is true, does mean "this day," or "to-day," and not "to this day;" a fact which has not escaped the translators, who have inserted the to in Italics, thus merely using it as an expletive required in the English language. Without separately replying to each of the reasons of your correspondent for believing the whole translation to belong to the past, I shall just quote another of his sentences, that I may remark upon it. After the passage in Hebrew, his own translation is given thus: "And Abraham called the name of that place Jehovah-jireh; because, said he, this day in the mountain the Lord hath pro vided." Then this sentence follows: "In this version, you will observe, that I have given to the future verb the signification of a preterite, which I conceive to be fully justified in the first instance of its occurrence, by the vau which stands at the beginning of the sentence, and, in the second instance, by the words going before it, which has the same power as the vau to convert the future tense into a preterite." Now though vau and us have sometimes this effect, yet they have not always. Vau, indeed, is conversive here, but only to the verb to which it is prefixed. of that place Jehovah-jireh,” i. e. (Jehovah shall provide,) "as it shall be said; This day in the mount of Jehovah it shall be seen." The Hebrew language, it should be remembered, has a character of its own. It does not, like other languages, invariably submit to be controuled by regular grammatical guidance; but the skilful reader is at no loss to determine, whether the past or future is intended to be expressed. The Hebrew Bible abounds with instances in which the writer darts from past to future, and adverts with rapidity to events widely remote from each other as to time, though of typical affinity, leaving it to the reader to account for the transition, In the present instance, there is great propriety and sublimity in the abrupt recurrence to the grand event which was to take place upon that very spot, which had been the scene of its typical representation. I have felt it a duty thus to offer my feeble endeavour to rectify what appears to me a very inadequate interpretation of a sentence, which contains a most interesting allusion to the stupendous Atonement which was to be offered up for the sin of the world. B. W. To the Editor of the Christian Observer. AN objection has been proposed to the account of the Evangelists, with regard to the miracles which took place just before the death of our Lord. The objection consists of two parts: first, that they do not seem to have been mentioned by any other historians; secondly, that it is scarcely credible that such important circumstances as the earthquake, the rending of the veil of the temple, and especially the darkness for three hours over the land of Judea, should not have extorted an involuntary belief, on the part of the Jews, of the mission of Jesus. No such effects are “And Abraham called the name stated to have taken place in con The first in the verse is not, however, literally translated by, "it shall be seen." The truth is, that it is in the future of Kal. The second is in the future of Niphal; Hametz being under Resh, and the long vowel Pzaire, instead of Hhirik, being under', to compensate for the characteristic Dagesh which cannot be placed in the Resh. What I have now said of the last , applies exactly to the יאמר conjugation of Thus the translation is: |