at all events
hints of good, still more experimental and more hazardous pieces of
biblical criticism have been not unwisely immolated. The full cause of
this will appear in the mere title of the first of these half-attempted
essays, viz:

THE WISDOM OF REVISION;

whereof my predication shall be simply and strictly _nil_.

The next piece of serious study, as yet little more than a root in my
mind, was to have fructified in the form of

HOMELY EXPOSITIONS,

or domestic readings in Scripture for daily use in family worship, with
an easy, sensible, useful sort of commentary; a book calculated
expressly for the understandings, wants, vices, temptations, and
peculiarities of household servants, and quite opposed to the usual
plans of injuriously raising doubts to lay them, of insisting upon
obsolete Judaisms, of strict theological controversy, of enlarging to
satiety on the meaning of passages too obvious to require explanation,
and ingeniously slurring over those which really need it; indeed, of
pursuing the courses generally adopted by the mass of commentators.

A further notion extended to

LAY SERMONS,

whereof are many written: their principal peculiarities consist in being
each of a quarter-hour length, as little as possible regarding Jews and
their didactic histories, and, as much as might be, crowding ideas, and
images, and out-of-the-way knowledge of all sorts, into the good service
of illustrating Gospel truths.

Another religious essay has been relinquished, although to a great
degree effected, from the apprehension that it may suggest matter
fanciful or false: also, in part, from the material being perhaps of too
slender a character to insist upon. Its name stood thus,

SCRIPTURAL PHYSICS;

being an attempt to vindicate the wisdom of Holy Writ in matters of
natural science; for example, cosmogony, geology, the probable centre of
the earth, the vitality and circulation of the blood, hints of magnetism
and electricity, a solar system, a plurality of worlds, the earth's
shape, inclined axis, situation in space, and connection with other
spheres, the separate existence of disembodied life, the laws of optics,
much of recondite natural history:--all these can be easily proved to be
alluded to in detached, or ingeniously compared, passages of the Hebrew
Scriptures. It is very likely, however, that Huntington has anticipated
some of this, although I have never met with his w