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This commutation of the punishment of death, into perpetual slavery, what a fortunate discovery! Alas! for the honor of Deity, if commentators had not manned the forlorn hope, and by a timely movement rescued the Divine character, at the very crisis of its fate, from the perilous position in which inspiration had carelessly left it!
They are very familiar words, and they have been made the basis of a great many sermons upon being all but persuaded to accept of Christ as Saviour. But, edifying as such a use of them is, it can scarcely be sustained by their actual meaning. Most commentators are agreed that our Authorised Version does not represent either Agrippa's words or his tone. He was not speaking in earnest.
The one story says that of every kind of living creature one pair should be taken into the ark; the other says that of clean beasts, seven pairs of each species should be received, and of unclean beasts only one pair. It is a pitiful instance of an attempt to evade a difficulty that cannot be evaded. One of the very conservative commentators, Dr.
Twice Jesus' calm was broken by recrudescence of horror and shrinking; the third time it came back, to abide through all the trying scenes of the passion, but for that one cry on the Cross, 'Why hast Thou forsaken Me? So it may be with us. The last words to the three have given commentators much trouble.
For Macdonald was essentially a scholar; he did not merely mug up notes by German commentators an hour before the lesson. For him the classics lived; and he made his form realise this. To do Aristophanes with him was far better than any music hall. Horace he hated. One day when they were doing Donec gratus eram tibi, he burst out with wrath: "Horrible little cad he was! Can't you see him?
He himself tells us that a critic should "first seek out some one with whom he can contend," and quotes in justification from one of Aristotle's commentators, Solet Aristoteles quaerere pugnam in suis libris. This Lessing was always wont to do. He could only feel his own strength, and make others feel it, could only call it into full play in an intellectual wrestling-bout.
But the difference between their assertions and ours is, that we fully prove the facts we allege, whereas they produce no evidence at all; for instance, Albertus Magnus says that Aristotle wrote an express treatise on the direction of the loadstone; but nobody ever saw that treatise, nor was it ever heard of by any of the rest of his commentators.
Always and everywhere lost battles, bad and ignorant generalship, require explanations, justifications, and commentaries. Well-fought battles are justified on the spot, the same day, and by results. No one asks or makes comments upon the fighting of Jackson. Austerlitz, Jena, were commented on, explained, some of the chiefs were justified, but by Austrian and Prussian commentators.
Aristotle, in quoting this remark, asserts, with the dogmatism which characterizes the philosophical commentators of every age, that "Empedocles is wrong," in making this assertion; but Lamarck, who lived twenty-three hundred years after Empedocles, is famous in the history of the doctrine of evolution for elaborating this very idea.
The Divina Commedia and Paradise Lost have conferred upon modern mythology a systematic form; and when change and time shall have added one more superstition to the mass of those which have arisen and decayed upon the earth, commentators will be learnedly employed in elucidating the religion of ancestral Europe, only not utterly forgotten because it will have been stamped with the eternity of genius.
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