f by stealth, I had only time
to dip into it here and there, and I should have been ashamed to
possess the book; but I carried off enough to suggest important
inquiry. The writer asserted that the Greek word [Greek: aionios],
(secular, or, belonging to the ages,) which we translate _everlasting
and eternal_, is distinctly proved by the Greek translation of the Old
Testament often to mean only _distant time_. Thus in Psalm lxxvi. 5,
"I have considered the years of _ancient_ times:" Isaiah lxiii 11, "He
remembered the days _of old_, Moses and his people;" in which, and
in many similar places, the LXX have [Greek: aionios]. One striking
passage is Exodus xv. 18; ("Jehovah shall reign for ever and ever;")
where the Greek has [Greek: ton aiona kai ex aiona kai eti], which
would mean "for eternity and still longer," if the strict rendering
_eternity_ were enforced. At the same time a suspicion as to
the honesty of our translation presented itself in Micah v. 2, a
controversial text, often used to prove the past eternity of the Son
of God; where the translators give us,--"whose goings forth have been
_from everlasting_," though the Hebrew is the same as they elsewhere
render _from days of old_.

After I had at leisure searched through this new question, I found
that it was impossible to make out any doctrine of a philosophical
eternity in the whole Scriptures. The true Greek word for _eternal_
([Greek: aidios]) occurs twice only: once in Rom. i. 20, as applied
to the divine power, and once in Jude 6, of the fire which has been
manifested against Sodom and Gomorrha. The last instance showed that
allowance must be made for rhetoric; and that fire is called _eternal_
or _unquenchable_, when it so destroys as to leave nothing unburnt.
But on the whole, the very vocabulary of the Greek and Hebrew denoted
that the idea of absolute eternity was unformed. The _hills_ are
called everlasting (secular?), by those who supposed them to have
come into existence two or three thousand years before.--Only in two
passages of the Revelations I could not get over the belief that the
writer's energy was misplaced, if absolute eternity of torment was not
intended: yet it seemed to me unsafe and wrong to found an important
doctrine on a symbolic and confessedly obscure book of prophecy.
Setting this aside, I found no proof of any _eternal_ punishment.

As soon as the load of Scriptural authority was thus taken off from
me, I had a vivid discernmen