tracting the child and the average man to the reading of the Bible, they would have made more paragraphs yet. They might easily have made twenty-seven.

Taking at random the first five chapters of Acts, we find that the English and the American Revisers make the same number of paragraphs, besides the poetry,-twentytwo in all but that the "Twentieth Century New Testament" makes fifty-one, besides frequently using Herbert Spencer's device of the sub-paragraph, or a break of half an inch in a line. It is easy to tell which of the three bodies of translators are by their work the most skillful fishers for men. It is a good thing for a translator, a scholar, to work from the standpoint of the tenderness, the condescension, of Christ.

The greater care given to the paragraphing by the American Committee, and the resulting success, may be studied in the effect produced by the transfer of the last clause of 2 Kings xxiv. 20 from the end of one paragraph to the beginning of the next; in the emergence of the thought when a paragraph is made at the middle of Isa. lix. 15; and by the revolution produced by a new paragraph and by rephrasing in Jer. xxix. 15. To these we wish we could add the transfer of the second half of 1 Cor. xii. 31 to the beginning of the paragraph and the chapter that follow the "most excellent way" is the subject of I Cor. xiii., and should be its opening words.1

(2) The American Committee say that they added to the text a good many hyphens. The hyphen is a valuable aid to clearness;2 in its place has become a requisite to

1It is so cast in the Westcott-and-Hort Greek Testament, and in the T.C.N.T.

2 Goldwin Smith wrote in his "United States": "There were social meetings for the young, such as raising bees and sewing bees." When the smiling critics suggested that a hyphen or two would have helped the sense, he could answer only that English usage was not strict in regard to the hyphen,—a fact that did not save him from being an object VOL. LIX. No. 235. 5

a clear, correct, and classic style. Punctuation has been a growth, with every addition justified by its meeting of the needs of expression; there is no more virtue or profit in keeping the Bible within its earlier limitations in this respect than in refusing to modernize a house.

(3) Of the care given to the punctuation by the American Revisers, and of the resulting niceties of discrimination, we may note a few interesting cases: In 2 Kings xxv. 29 the question of "who did what" is remarkably cleared up by a period and the adding of a name: there are many cases like this. In Mic. v. 5 a period makes a valuable change. In Gen. xxx. 3, and in many other places, a comma after "behold "shows that the word is an exclamation (hinne'): in the older versions the lack of a comma makes "behold" seem a governing verb. In Jer. xiv. 18 the effect of the comma is especially good.

If any one thinks the comma too petty a matter for serious regard, let him turn to Luke iv. 17: "There was delivered unto him the book of the prophet Isaiah. And he opened the book, and found the place where it was written.. Let him put a comma after "place," and he will find that a comma can tell a story, can call up an historical picture, can revolutionize the sense. Jesus did not take a passage at random, nor select one for himself; he "found the place," the place appointed for the day; its boundaries are marked in the Hebrew Bible yet. As we look at the line thus written, what we have read of the scene in the tabernacle rises before the mind like a picture; our eyes are "fastened on him," and we seem to hear the gracious voice saying, "To-day hath this scripture been fulfilled in your ears."

of mirth. No sentence in the Bible may need the hyphen quite as much as did this one of Mr. Smith's, and yet the hyphen is a very good thing for the Bible.

The scope of this paper does not take in the multitude of places in which the American Revisers sought and found an apter word or form. If the student, with or without help from the original, will carefully compare the two Revisions in Isa. lx. 5; Hosea xi. 2; Mic. i. 6; and Hab. iii. 16, he will get some conception of the time, the thought, the discernment, the conscience, and the love, that have been lavished upon the effort to detect the meaning of even the obscurest words. The book of Job seems to us to have been remarkably improved in this way: its eloquence, always impressive, has seemed to acquire new splendor with each touch of the corrector's hand. It is like the angel that has stood only half-emerged from the marble, but now has been chiseled out almost into full and magnificent release.

For, indeed, an adequate translator of the Bible must be a very Michelangelo in words. He must have a passion for the simple, the sincere, the noble. He must have a genius for the word that expresses, and for the marshaling of words upon the printed page. All that belongs to diction, to rhythm, to cadence, to what Horace Bushnell called the second and the third stories of words, must be a part of his native or his acquired equipment for his work. A single false note in the dignity of a word or a phrase, a single harshness in rhythm and especially in the roll of a sentence to its close, must be to him, as to the disciplined reader, like a discord in the Hallelujah Chorus. The makers of both the recent Revisions must have approached the supreme passages of the Bible, the Fifty-first Psalm, the fifty-third of Isaiah, the sermon on the mount, the triumph of Paul over death, the rapt vision of the new Jerusalem, not only with awe before their intrinsic character, but also with a prayer that they might be enabled to rise to an expression not utterly unworthy, and that to this end the Spirit of God might guide the hand with which they essayed to write.

ARTICLE IV.

HARNACK'S "ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY” AND HIS CRITICS.1

BY PROFESSOR O. ZÖCKLER, D.D., PH.D.

SINCE the latter part of the summer of 1900, a new definition of Christianity is being eagerly propagated, which at the same time is to serve as a basis for a corresponding practical reorganization of the Christian religion. The originator of this definition, as well as his numerous adherents and admirers, seems to entertain the desire that it may influence the widest circles of our educated people, giving an impulse for a religious reformatory movement in the sense of this new formula. We are not able to join in this desire. The proposed formula does not appear to us to be adapted to the purpose mentioned, nor are we able to recognize it as new. We would not be able to see in its eventual use for laying a foundation for any attempt at improving our religious condition, a progress for the better, but only a relapse into errors that have long ago been overcome. The reduction of the Christianity of the church, after Kant's prescription, to a fellowship of believers in God, virtue, and immortality of the soul, as Harnack's book proposes, would, if generally accepted and worked out to its practical consequences, push back our religious intellectual life by more than a hundred years. The attempt of Harnack is intended to be apologetic; its originator "speaks as a historian, but the historian has not suffocated the theologian and the Christian." "Yes,"-this is the

1 [Translated from the German (Beweis des Glaubens), by Rev. J. G. Fetzer, Wandsbek, Germany.]

opinion of one of those admirers,-"the entire work, from the first to the last word, becomes a strong, effective apology of Christianity." We cannot assent to such eulogy. Even as historian, Harnack does not satisfy us in his judgment as to the foundations and the original form of religion-far less as an apologete. His statements do not benefit the true faith of the Bible and of the church at all, but a deistically diluted and shallow religiosity, which is satisfied with an essentially moral substance of Christianity. What his book offers the educated of our day, instead of the positive evangelical Christianity, is-in spite of the elegant and ingenious words in which he clothes his thoughts-only re-erection of that rationalism which was proclaimed from all pulpits and professors' chairs in Germany at the beginning of the last century.

We had rather kept silent as to the publication which accomplishes so little of that which Christian apology, according to our view, ought to accomplish, but the enthusiastic overestimation of the work, by so many of its panegyrists, requires a contradiction. In opposition to the would-be apologetic, which in fact robs Christianity of its positive contents, since it reduces it to a shallow God-father religion, the real apologetics must step in, which bear testimony for the entire and full faith of the Christian, and not only for the first article of faith. In consequence of the impulse given from Berlin, a number of manifestations followed, which declared themselves in full accord with that reduction; but not less numerous voices have been raised against it, and the number of those protesting against it is steadily increasing. In connection with some of the most important of these, it is intended to give in this paper a condensed view of the development and present condition of the controversy.

1Dr. Drews (professor in Giessen, formerly in Jena), in his review of the book in the Christliche Welt, 1900, Nr. 46.