d and to understand
accurately a theological treatise written in English four hundred
years ago. The same happened, and happened to a far greater extent, in
ancient languages. Nor was the sacred character attributed to certain
writings any safeguard. On the contrary, greater violence is done by
successive interpreters to sacred writings than to any other relics
of ancient literature. Ideas grow and change, yet each generation
tries to find its own ideas reflected in the sacred pages of their
early prophets, and, in addition to the ordinary influences which blur
and obscure the sharp features of old words, artificial influences are
here at work distorting the natural expression of words which have
been invested with a sacred authority. Passages in the Veda or
Zend-Avesta which do not bear on religious or philosophical doctrines
are generally explained simply and naturally, even by the latest of
native commentators. But as soon as any word or sentence can be so
turned as to support a doctrine, however modern, or a precept, however
irrational, the simplest phrases are tortured and mangled till at last
they are made to yield their assent to ideas the most foreign to the
minds of the authors of the Veda and Zend-Avesta.

To those who take an interest in these matters we may recommend a
small Essay lately published by the Rev. R. G. S. Browne--the 'Mosaic
Cosmogony'--in which the author endeavours to establish a literal
translation of the first chapter of Genesis. Touching the first verb
that occurs in the Bible, he writes: 'What is the meaning or scope of
the Hebrew verb, in our authorised version, rendered by "created?" To
English ears and understandings the sound comes naturally, and by long
use irresistibly, as the representation of an ex nihilo creation. But,
in the teeth of all the Rabbinical and Cabbalistic fancies of Jewish
commentators, and with reverential deference to modern criticism on
the Hebrew Bible, it is not so. R. D. Kimchi, in his endeavour to
ascertain the shades of difference existing between the terms used in
the Mosaic cosmogony, has assumed that our Hebrew verb bara has the
full signification of ex nihilo creavit. Our own Castell, a profound
and self-denying scholar has entertained the same groundless notion.
And even our illustrious Bryan Walton was not inaccessible to this
oblique ray of Rabbinical or ignis fatuus.'

Mr. Browne then proceeds to quote Gesenius, who gives as the primary
meaning of b