mselves. How much might be saved, if in discussion, the thing to be
proved were always _assumed_. To beg the question in debate, would be
vast economy of midnight oil! and a great forestaller of wrinkles and
grey hairs! Instead of protracted investigation into Scripture usage,
with painful collating of passages, to find the meaning of terms, let
every man interpret the oldest book in the world by the usages of his
own time and place, and the work is done. And then instead of one
revelation, they might be multiplied as the drops of the morning, and
every man have an infallible clue to the mind of the Spirit, if he only
understood the dialect of his own neighborhood! What a Babel-jargon it
would make of the Bible to take it for granted that the sense in which
words are _now_ used is the _inspired_ sense, David says, "I prevented
the dawning of the morning, and cried." What, stop the earth in its
revolution! Two hundred years ago, _prevent_ was used in its strict
Latin sense to _come before_, or _anticipate_. It is always used in this
sense in the Old and New Testaments. David's expression, in the English
of the nineteenth century, would be "Before the dawning of the morning I
cried." In almost every chapter of the Bible, words are used in a sense
now nearly or quite obsolete, and sometimes in a sense totally
_opposite_ to their present meaning. A few examples follow: "I purposed
to come to you, but was _let_ (hindered) hitherto." "And the four
_beasts_ (living ones) fell down and worshipped God,"--"Whosoever shall
_offend_ (cause to sin) one of these little ones,"--"Go out into the
highways and _compel_ (urge) them to come in,"--"Only let your
_conversation_ (habitual conduct) be as becometh the Gospel,"--"They
that seek me _early_ (earnestly) shall find me,"--"So when tribulation
or persecution ariseth _by-and-by_ (immediately) they are offended."
Nothing is more mutable than language. Words, like bodies, are always
throwing off some particles and absorbing others. So long as they are
mere _representatives_, elected by the whims of universal suffrage,
their meaning will be a perfect volatile, and to cork it up for the next
century is an employment sufficiently silly (to speak within bounds) for
a modern Bible Dictionary maker. There never was a shallower conceit
than that of establishing the sense attached to a word centuries ago, by
showing what it means _now_. Pity that fashionable mantuamakers were not
a little quicker