REVIEW. "Still pleased to praise, yet not afraid to blame."-POPE. ART. I.-A New Version of the First Three Chapters of Genesis; accompanied with Dissertations illustrative of the Creation, the Fall of Man, the Principle of Evil, and the Plagues of Egypt. To which are annexed Strictures on Mr. Bellamy's Translation. By Essenus. 8vo. pp. 168. Hunter. 1819. 6s. THIS HIS work is the acknowledged production of Dr. John Jones, to whom the public are under great obligations for his learned and ingenious publications on the Sacred Writings and the early history of the church. Like all his works, it is ingenious and, in many particulars, original, and therefore interesting even where it is not convincing. Our object is less to criticise it than to make our readers acquainted, and as far as we can, in the author's own language, with its principal features. In his "New Version," the author translates pp expanse, and not as in the common version, firmament, observing that it signifies mere space or extension. He says, "The terms by which the firmament is expressed in Greek and Latin, and in many modern tongues, exhibit a remarkable instance of the influence of philosophical opinion on language. Early in the second century, an Egyptian philosopher taught that the firmament or heavens consisted of solid orbs, each star being supposed to be fixed in a solid transparent sphere, like crystal. This notion was doubtless not new: it prevailed in Egypt ages before, though from Ptolemy, who, with some additions and modifications, no doubt first systematically taught it, it went by the name of the Ptolemaic system. It is from the prevalence of this opinion, that spewμa in Greek, and firmament in Latin, came to be applied * We put down Dr. Jones's theological publications in the order in which they something firm and solid. Hence too the to the heavens, though these nouns imply appeared: 1. A Developement of Remarkable Events, calculated to restore the used by Homer and other poets to chaepithets κρατερος, χαλκοβατης, &c. are Christian Religion to its Original Purity, racterize the heavens. Moses, on the and to repel the Objections of Unbe other hand, has employed a term which lievers. 2 vols. 8vo. 1800. 2. The Epis- denotes mere expansion or extension; tle of Paul to the Romans analysed, from and this circumstance shews, either that a Developement of those Circumstances he was untainted with the vain theories in the Roman Church, by which it was of the Egyptians, or, which is more prooccasioned. 8vo. 1801. 3. Illustrations of the Four Gospels, founded on Circum- bable, that he lived in an age antecedent to them. The seventy translators thought stances peculiar to our Lord and the Evangelists. 8vo. 1808. 4. Ecclesiastical it wiser to follow the Egyptians than their Researches; or Philo and Josephus proved translation in Egypt, and in conformity lawgiver in this respect. They wrote their to be Historians and Apologists of Christ, and of his Followers, and of the Gospel. to the prejudices of that people, used 8vo. 1812. 5. Sequel to Ecclesiastical Researches, in which the Origin of the Introductory Chapters of Matthew and Luke is brought to light from Josephus, and in which the peculiar articles of the Orthodox Faith are traced to the System of the Gnostics, who opposed the Gospel in the Days of Christ and his Apostles. 8vo. 1813.-The title of another volume just published by this indefatigable author will be found in our List of Books. Besides these contributions to sacred learning, Dr. Jones is the author of a Latin Grammar, a Latin Vocabulary on a new Plan, and a Greek Grammar, which have obtained considerable popuLarity. gea, which signifies a solid mass. This warrants us in concluding that the system, which in after days was taught by Ptolemy, prevailed in Egypt before the authors of the Septuagint."-Pp. 1, 2, Note. Dr. Jones renders Gen. i. 1, "In the beginning God planned the heavens and the earth," and Gen. ii. 3, "he rested from all the work which God planned to be produced." Moses, he thinks, intended by this language to set aside the false notions of those who maintained that the heavens either had no beginning, or began to exist by natural causes. Two words are used by the Hebrew lawgiver, 1 bara, to create, and my asha, to make; and these the author maintains have very distinct senses, the former meaning to plan, to model, to devise; the latter, to effect or produce. The one is a term of science, and expresses the operation of the understanding while planning, scheming or inventing; the other of art, and denotes the execution or performance of any scheme. In the words " Let us make man," Dr. Jones considers that there is an allusion to an architect commanding his workmen, or to a sovereign consulting his ministers; but he says that the language is merely anthropomorphitical, an accommodation to human conceptions. We extract his remarks on the much-disputed word 'n eloheim. "Under this title the Creator is held forth as a sovereign, as having an absolute dominion over the works which he has made; and man is made in the image of eloheim, because he possesses under God a power over the inferior animals. And if man may be called eloheim, as lord of the creation, with still more propriety the term may be applied to those men who exercise dominion over their fellow-creatures. Analogy requires that the root should be ala,* which of still exists in Arabic, in the sense of to bind by an oath. In this sense, no verb could be used with more propriety to designate princes and potentates, who have power to bind their subjects in allegiance to themselves. In all languages, many words exist which convey, under a Eloheim is one of that number; and for plurality of form, a singular signification. this peculiarity a satisfactory reason can be assigned. Power, however absolute, is never enjoyed by one man without the participation of a few, who carry on his administration, and form his court. It is in reference to this circumstance, that in most tongues, a king, though numerically one, is described as if he were many; and in our own country, the use of the pronouns we and our, in the sense of self, is an exclusive prerogative of royalty. Analogy is sufficiently clear to warrant its application to the Almighty, in the relation of a sovereign. Jehovah himself, indeed, is absolutely one, uncompounded in nature, indivisible into parts or persons; but he is nevertheless considered as surrounded with those spiritual beings called angels, who constitute his celestial court, and execute his will through boundless space. The term eloheim, therefore, is not improperly used to mean God; but we should remember, that Moses uses it not to express his essence as an infinite being, but his sovereignty as the Creator and Governor of the universe: the term, therefore, which comes nearest to the original is Almighty." Pp. 24-26. This new translator renders Gen. i. 11, which in our English version is after his kind, "each after its model." The Hebrew word 'n mein, he says, when applied to things in the Divine mind meant models; to the classes of things, kinds; to ourselves, ideas. "I am happy to find, that many the critics, among whom was Michaelis, considered as the origin of eloheim. It is taken from ail, strong; and its primary sense is to make strong, to bind by an oath. The consequence of violating an oath is to incur a curse; hence it may mean to implore a curse upon a person, to imprecate or curse: but this is only its secondary signification. Parkhurst, in explaining eloheim, has the audacity to give the following impious nonsense as the true import of the word: 'A name usually given in the Hebrew Scriptures to the ever-blessed Trinity, by which they represent themselves as under the obligation of an oath to perform certain conditions, and as having pronounced a curse on all, men or devils, who do not conform to them.' It is pleasant to turn away from such fooleries to plain sense. Eben Ezrah,' says Geddes, and the rest of the Jewish commentators say, that the plural, when erudition. I add, that the Greeks, from applied to the one true God, is used for a similar motive, expressed a chief or a honour's sake, according to the idiom of man of rank by the plural article, and a the language; and this I take to be the preposition with its dependent noun; thus real case.' This, at least, is not far from οἱ αμφι Πρίαμον, Priam and his suite, the truth. Dr. Geddes's note on this or Priam alone. See Iliad iii. 146. word is a tract of sound sense and great Xen. Mem. I. 1, 18." "The Atheistical philosophers, considering the phænomena of nature as the result of matter and motion, rejected the doctrine of ideas or models; while Moses and his followers insisted on them as inseparable from the existence of a Supreme Intelligence; for this obvious reason, that nothing can proceed from design, but that of which an idea previously existed in the mind of the designer. If, then, things came into being without ideas, they came without design, and consequently without a designing cause. This is the conclusion which the Jewish legislator sets aside, by representing Jehovah as planning this fair system of things before he actually produced it."— Pp. 21-22. Dr. Jones's explanation of the Mosaic account of the fall of man is not altogether novel, but his illustrations of his theory are both singular and bold. He takes the history to be allegorical, and all the events to be symbolic. His system is, that the tree of life, in the Garden of Eden, was the symbol of moral purity in the immediate presence of God, that the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was the symbol of the marriage state, that the eating of its fruit meant the first act by which Adam recognized Eve as his wife, and that the serpent is the symbol of desire, planted in the human frame, but which carried to excess becomes criminal passion or sensuality. In the curse on the serpent, the author considers a promise of the Messiah to be couched. "In due time the seed of the woman appeared. In the accomplishment of his noble end, he was followed by a brood of vipers who stung his heel. The garden of Gethsemane, the judgment-seat of Pilate, and the Mount of Calvary in particular, witnessed the venom of their malice. But supported by the power of God, and animated by the glorious reward that awaited him at the right hand of his heavenly Father, he persevered; and the head of the serpent received a mortal wound."-Pp. 36, 37. The serpent was universally worshiped in the Pagan world; and the author adopts the theory of Bryant, whom he highly praises, that the miracles of Moses and the plagues of Egypt, were designed, amongst other ends, to put dishonour upon this species of idolatry. By the death threatened to Adam's disobedience, Dr. Jones understands exclusion from the immediate presence of God. He turns the account of the fall against the doctrine of natural depravity, and maintains, that the enmity declared to be put between the serpent and the woman and their respective seed, implies a principle in human nature, reason or conscience, which is directly hostile to immoral propensities. To the misinterpretation of the whole allegory he attributes the origin of the doctrine of two opposite eternal principles, the one good and the other evil. He considers that the Messiah, the seed of the woman, will bruise the serpent's head, by subduing all passions that are merely animal, and by removing the corruptible part of human nature; that our Lord at his second coming will exercise literally the functions of a king; that this earth, renovated after some mysterious convulsions, and rendered paradisiacal, is to be the theatre of his power, and that here the wise and good in a glorified state are to take up their abode. The ingenious author imagines that Paul, in the seventh chapter of the Epistle to the Romans, makes the Mosaic narrative the basis of his reasoning, substituting sin as another name for the serpent. We cannot deny that there is some plausibility in the conjecture, but it really appears to us that fancy has carried away the writer far beyond the bounds of sobriety, in the following allegorical illustration: "The Christian law, inasmuch as it penetrates the innermost recesses, reaching even the heart, condemns or acquits those under its jurisdiction, not from their outward actions, but, from the motives which gave them birth, far surpasses all other laws in excellence and efficacy. Its superiority to the law of Moses is set forth in the following passage: For what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God, having sent his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, condemned sin for sinning with the flesh.' Here again sin and flesh are personified, and represented as having a They, however, conduct their intrigues criminal intercourse with each other. with so much secresy, that the law, or the legitimate husband of the flesh, though convinced of their guilt, had no means sufficient to arraign and punish the offenders. The law, we are told, was weak through the flesh. By which we are to understand, that through the imperfection of human discernment, it could not recognize crimes that were only intended or meditated in the heart; nor punish, for want of clear and positive evidence, such things as are done in se cret. This neither the law of Moses nor any human law could effect. But in order to supply its inability, the omniscient Creator, seeing sin making a private appointment with flesh, invests his own son with the dress and similitude of the former, and dispatches him to the very place where, under the covert of darkness, the latter had agreed to meet him. Flesh arrives at the place appointed; the Son of God drops his feigned appearance, and stands before her in the figure of her real husband. Thus he detects their guilt; exposes the odious character of sin, and brings the partner of his crimes to merited punishment. Divest the paragraph of its personification, and you have this simple meaning: The Christian law, far surpassing all other laws in extent and efficacy, pronounces a person criminal, though his crimes may be unseen by man, and though committed only in design. Extending its cognizance to the bosom of men, beyond the reach of human discernment, it decides upon their characters from the motives and designs of their hearts, and thus detects and punishes sins, which pass undetected and unpunished by other laws.'"-Pp. 99-101. We can only refer to Chap. vi. in which the author traces the personification of Natural and Moral Evil under the terms Satan, Devil, Serpent, &c.; explains the Temptation of Christ, according to the scheme before maintained in his Illustrations of the Gospels, as internal and mental; and shews that the Book of Job was written in order to set aside the doctrine of an evil principle. The whole may be recommended to the theological student. The Remarks on Mr. Bellamy's recent Translation of the Bible, out of which the work of Essenus grew, form but a small part of it, and that, we think, the least interesting part. Dr. Jones ranks himself, though unwillingly, amongst Mr. Bellamy's adversaries; and he treats him with little ceremony. "This gentleman seems to have been brought up amongst the rabbies, and to have drunk deep of their learning. But he has not been fortunate in the period of his birth. Had he flourished in the dark ages, he might have imposed on the public without impeachment, such mystic conundrums for Hebrew lore; but it is too much in the present enlightened state of criticism, to expect men to receive his Cabalistic nonsense, though delivered with the authority of an oracle."-146, 147. "21. Now Jehovah God caused an inactive state to fall upon the man, and he slept; then he brought one to his side, whose flesh he had enclosed in her place. 22. Thus Jehovah God built the substance of the other, which he took for the man, even a woman; and he brought her to the man. 23. And the man said, Thus this time, bone after my bone, also flesh after my flesh for this he will call woman; because she was received by the man. 24. Therefore a man will leave even his father and his mother: for he will unite with his wife; and they shall be for one flesh.'"-Pp. 147, 148. To this new translation, Dr. Jones makes some valid critical objections, and then returns an answer to Mr. Bellamy's moral reasons against the common acceptation of the passage, in which he maintains an almost equally heretical theory : "Suppose the creation of the woman from the rib of the man to be one of the deep and hidden operations of God-Is it not an operation equally deep and hidden, that every man ever since should come from under the ribs of a woman? And yet this last is proved by universal experience be not a sufficient reply, we may, rience. But if the analogy from expewithout any violence to the language of Moses, consider the whole scene as a vision, presented by God himself to teach Adam and his posterity a very beautiful moral lesson. It will be readily allowed, I presume, that a wife, if such as she ought to be, is a moral security to her husband, and ought in return to be an object of his endearment; that, as she originally came from his side, she ought ever to be at his side, even in preference to father and mother. Of this lesson the rib was an appropriate symbol, it being from its position, at once a security to the heart, and witness of its feelings, and a supporter of its functions. 'God,' says Moses, brought a deep sleep on Adam.' He thus caused him to see in the vision of a dream, or as Milton says, in a trance, one of his ribs, and some of his flesh taken away by his Creator, and formed or, as it is in the original, built into a woman. Adam, on opening his eyes, beheld with delight and surprise, her who was designed to become his mate; and he exclaims: This woman is made after my own image, and is, moreover, bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh;-being thus intended for my wife, and made to be one with myself, she shall take upon her my name."-Pp. 157, 158. We had marked some other pas sages for insertion in this notice of Dr. Jones's volume, but we must refer the reader to the work itself, which will amply gratify his curiosity. We cannot dismiss Essenus without giving our thanks to the author for his valuable contributions to sacred literature, which are not, we fear, estimated according to their value, or received by the Unitarians, whose cause they essentially serve, with the gratitude which the author unquestionably merits from that denomination. On the subject of the Atonement, the Catechism is clear and rational. The death of Christ is represented as a ratification of his mission, and as a preparation for his resurrection; and it is observed with great truth, (p. 302,) that in the work of salvation more depends upon the resurrection than upon the death of Christ. Little is said in the Catechism upon the question of evil spirits, but the compilers evidently believed in their existence. They seem also to have held the common Protestant doctrine ART. II. The Racovian Catechism, with regard to future punishment. &c. [Concluded from p. 173.] HE Racovian doctrine concerning THE the nature of the Holy Spirit was nearly the same as that held by the modern Unitarians. The Catechism defines it (p. 285) " a virtue or energy flowing from God to men." This definition excludes personality as well as divinity. But some of the proper Socinians, and particularly those in England, as may be seen from the 4to. Unitarian Tracts, held that the Spirit was a being, the first in rank and dignity of the celestial hierarchy. The hypothesis was revived by the late Mr. Hopkins in his " Appeal to the Common Sense of all Christian People." The gift of the Holy Spirit is considered in the Catechism as two-fold; visible and invisible, temporary and perpetual. In the former point of view, it was the same as the gift of miracles, which has been long with drawn; in the latter, it is still imparted to believers, and is a divine inspiration, whereby our minds are filled with a more enlarged knowledge of divine things, or with a more certain hope of eternal life, also with joy in and a certain foretaste of future happiness, or with an extraordinary measure of divine glory and piety." (P. 287.) A gift of this kind would be a real miracle, but a miracle of which there could be no evidence. In his annotations upon this part of the Catechism, Wissowatius quotes the observation of Erasmus on 1 Cor. vii. 39, that "No one of the ancients ventured plainly to assert that the Holy Spirit was of the same substance with the Father and the Son; not even when the question concerning the Son was every where discussed with so much warmth." The Socinians were decided freewillers. They entertained a pious trine of predestination. horror of the consequences of the docIn their simple metaphysics, the necessity of human actions was synonymous with the destruction of religion, and to represent God as the author of sin was to represent him as wicked. (Pp. 332, 333.) It is scarcely necessary to add, that they abandoned the tenet of the original and hereditary depravity of man kind. In their views of the Lord's Supper the Catechists agreed with Zuinglius, who carried the Reformation further tained some sort of real presence ; on this point than Calvin, who main. they regarded the ordinance purely as a rite of commemoration. On the article of baptism they were still more heretical; they denied the ordinance to infants, and maintained that the only proper mode of administering it known, rejected baptism altogether, was by immersion. Socinus, as is well except, perhaps, in the case of proselytes from another religion; and in the first edition of the Catechism, published under his eye, the Lord's Supper precept. The translator has described was declared to be the only ceremonial opinion amongst the present English in a note (pp. 257, 258) the state of Unitarians with regard to baptism. There is a fourfold division on this point, and we may for brevity' sake class the sects under the heads of Baptists, Pædobaptists, Proselyte-Baptists consider baptism as a Jewish obserand Anti-Baptists. vance, and therefore not obligatory upon Gentile converts, and consequently not included in the commission of the apostle of the Gentiles. The last-named It will be seen by the following quo |