is a false interpretation, and utterly unpoetical. It is
even doubtful whether [Hebrew: unable to transliterate. txt Ed.]
('ruach') in this place means 'spirit' in contradistinction to 'matter'
at all, and not rather air or wind. At all events, the poetic decorum,
the proportion, and the antithetic parallelism, demand a somewhat as
much below God, as the horse is below man. The opposition of 'flesh' and
'spirit' in the Gospel of St. John, who thought in Hebrew, though he
wrote in Greek, favours our common version,--'flesh and not spirit':
but the place in which this passage stands, namely, in one of the first
forty chapters of Isaiah, and therefore written long before the
Captivity, together with the majestic simplicity characteristic of
Isaiah's name gives perhaps a greater probability to the other: 'Egypt
is man, and not God; and her horses flesh, and not wind'. If Mr. Oxlee
renders the fourth verse of Psalm civ.--'He maketh spirits his
messengers', (for our version--'He maketh his angels spirits'--is
without a violent inversion senseless), this is a case in point for the
use of the word, 'spirits', in the sense of incorporeal beings. (Mr.
Oxlee will hardly, I apprehend, attribute the opinion of some later
Rabbis, that God alone and exclusively is a Spirit, to the Sacred
Writers, easy as it would be to quote a score of texts in proof of the
contrary.) I, however, cannot doubt that the true rendering of the
above-mentioned verse in the Psalms is;--'He maketh the winds his angels
or messengers, and the lightnings his ministrant servants'.

As to Mr. Oxlee's 'abstract intelligences,' I cannot but think
'abstract' for 'pure,' and even pure intelligences for incorporeal, a
lax use of terms. With regard to the point in question, the truth seems
to be this. The ancient Hebrews certainly distinguished the principle or
ground of life, understanding, and will from ponderable, visible,
matter. The former they considered and called 'spirit', and believed it
to be an emission from the Almighty Father of Spirits: the latter they
called 'body'; and in this sense they doubtless believed in the
existence of incorporeal beings. But that they had any notion of
immaterial beings in the sense of Des Cartes, is contrary to all we know
of them, and of every other people in the same degree of cultivation.
Air, fire, light, express the degrees of ascending refinement. In the
infancy of thought the life, soul, mind, are supposed to be air--'an