11. (h) Vastation, and devastation, and desolation: and heart melted, and tottering of knees, and trembling in all loins; and the faces of them all gather redness.

12. (i) Where is the abode of lions, and the same the feeding place for young lions: Where lion, lioness walked, lion's cub, and there was none to affright;

13. (i) Lion that rapined enough for his cubs, and strangled for his lionesses; so that he filled his holes with prey, and his abodes with rapine?

14. Behold! I am at thee, saith Jehovah of hosts, and will burn in smoke her chariots, and the sword shall eat up thy young lions: and I will cut off thy prey from the earth, and the voice of thy messengers shall not be heard any more.

CHAPTER III.

1. Woe, city of bloods; all of it is full of deceit and violence: plunder ceaseth not.

2. Voice of whip, and voice of roar of wheels: and horse curveting and chariot bounding.

3. Rider causing to mount, (a) and flame of sword, and lightening of spear; and multitude of slain, and mass of carcasses: and no end to the corpses; they stumble on their corpses.

4. For the multitude of the whoredoms of the whore, beautiful of favour, mistress of enchantments: that sold nations by her whoredoms, and families by her enchantments.

5. Behold! I am at thee, saith Jehovah of hosts, and will uncover

(h) The abject terror and consternation of the vanquished. That to grow red is a symptom of a peculiar kind of agitated terror, appears from the "faces of flames," in Is. xiii. 8, as well as from the literal rendering of this passage and that in Joel ii. 6; in these last two places the authorised version erroneously has "blackness."-This verse begins, in the original, with three emphatic words very near each other in sound; and the translation attempts to imitate this effect.

(i) The structure of these two verses requires us to extend the force of the interrogation to the end of v. 13, and to make no full stop, as to the sense, at the end of v. 12. The adult lion, which is mentioned in the former verse, is further described, as to his rapacity, in the latter.

(a) Causing to mount. This is literally rendered. As it is an elliptical expression, it may be taken to mean, causing his war-horse to rear, when engaged in close conflict (which is the opinion of Gesenius); or 'causing him to ascend the steep mound on which the city stood; or causing his captive to mount, that he may carry her off, as in chap. ii, 8. Ewald considers it a military term, signifying the act of raising the weapons so as to prepare for the assault.

thy skirts over thy faces: and will make nations see thy nakedness, and kingdoms thy lightness.

6. And I will cast abominations upon thee, and defile thee: and make thee a spectacle.

7. And it shall be, every one that seeth thee shall flee from thee, and shall say, Nineveh is laid waste! who shall lament for her: whence shall I seek comforters for thee?

8. Art thou better than No Ammon, which was seated on the rivers, waters round about her: whose rampart was the sea, whose wall was from the sea

?

9. Cush was [her] strength, and Misraim, and there was no end: Pût and Lubîm were in thy aid. (b)

10. Even she went to exile in captivity; even her little ones were dashed at the head of all streets and over her honoured ones they cast lots, and all her great ones were bound in chains.

11. Thou, too, shalt be drunken, shalt be darkened: thou, too, shalt seek protection of the enemy.

12. All thy fortresses are fig-trees with early figs : if they are shaken, they fall upon the mouth of the eater.

13. Behold! thy people are women in the midst of thee, for thy enemies; (c) open, opened are the gates of thy land: fire eateth thy bars. 14. Draw thyself waters of siege, strengthen thy fortresses: go into the clay, and tread in the loam; make strong the brick-kiln.

15. (d) There shall fire eat thee, the sword cut thee off, shall eat thee as the hopper: multiply thyself as the hopper; multiply thyself as the locust.

16. Thou hast increased thy merchants above the stars of the heavens the hopper moulteth, so that it fleeth away.

17. (d) Thy crowned ones are as the locusts, and thy chieftains as the swarms of gôb-locusts: which camp on the fences on a day of cold; the

(b) Our present Hebrew Text has not her; but, as all the most ancient versions express the possessive here, and as a mere point in the last letter of the word would denote it, most modern translators have not scrupled to assume it. Hitzig, however, adheres strictly to our text, and assigns the word an adverbial force, so that the sense is, "Cush mightily." There is no philological objection to this; and it tallies with the parallel adverbial clause, "Misraim, and there was no end;" ¿. e. innumerably. Gesenius has also adopted this view.

(c) Are women, for thy enemies. It is possible, as far as the position of the words 'for thy enemies' is concerned, to connect them either with the preceding or succeeding clause. It seems preferable to construe them with the former, as Hitzig has done.

(d) It is very difficult to render the ten different Hebrew names for locusts. Of the

sun shineth, and they flee away, and their place is not known where they are.

18. Thy shepherds sleep, O king of Ashshûr, thy nobles lie down : thy people are scattered on the hills, and there is no gatherer.

19. There is no soothing for thy breach, thy stroke is grievous: all that hear thy report clap the palm over thee; for on whom hath not thy evil passed continually ?

66

three which here occur, the one rendered "locusts" simply, is the most general name for them. The one rendered by "hopper" may be derived from a root bearing that literal sense, and is supposed to be the locust in the third transformation of its larva state. The larva, namely, sheds its skin four times; and each time increases in size, and approaches nearer to the development of the perfect insect. In the third of these stages, the animal is so far advanced, that, although still without wings, it is very active in its motions, and is aptly described as the hopper. The next time it sheds its skin (or moults, according to the term used by naturalists) it acquires wings, and extends its devastations by flight. The verb translated "moulteth" means to strip," "to plunder" (also "to disperse "); but it is used, in Is. xxxii. 11, in the sense of stripping oneself. Credner, who has given the most complete modern disquisition on the locusts of the Bible (in his "Der Prophet Joel"), contends that this sense of shedding the skin is legitimately deduced from its acknowledged signification of stripping, and that it is singularly applicable to the hopper, as it describes that characteristic act by which it is first enabled to flee away. He also maintains that the point of comparison of the merchants of Nineveh to the hopper, lies in the fact, that, as it suddenly gets its wings and takes flight, it is a suitable image of the sudden manner in which the commerce of Nineveh disappeared. Moreover, the parallelism with the next verse supports this view, as the gôb-locusts are there described as clustering together in the cold, but vanishing without a trace when the sun shines; which is a cognate emblem of complete and sudden disappearance. (1. c. p. 297). The words "swarm of gôb-locusts" are used to represent gôb-gobai; the repetition of which gives the idea of numbers, while the term itself is an untranslatable name for some species of locust.

EXPLANATIONS WITHOUT FOUNDATIONS.

HOWEVER good the cause in which a number of individuals may unitedly embark, it is obvious, that their success will greatly depend upon the efficiency of the means they employ to obtain the desired object. A true well-wisher to the cause, when he observes the means employed to be wanting in efficiency, will be at some pains to point out the deficiency with a view to its correction; and the pain to himself, which the discharge of this duty may originate, and the prospect of discomfort to which, it may be imagined, it may lead, should not be allowed to deter; but, confiding in the integrity of his motives, he should proceed onwards with his task; and, while

he takes credit for being actuated by charity himself, gain confidence in the reflection, that the brighter this heavenly grace burns in the bosoms of those whom he addresses, the more useful will be his labour, and the less likely to provoke offence.

The receivers of the heavenly doctrines have associated for the purpose of promulgating the truth; and, although the goodness of their cause guarantees that success is ultimately certain, the progress towards this consummation may be retarded by the negligence, or accelerated by the diligence, of those on whom individual exertion chiefly devolves; and in whose efforts, consequently, confidence is reposed. To point out that due diligence has not, in every instance, been exercised, is the not very agreeable task that I have self-imposed. In doing this, however, I prefer no claim to anything beyond a little observation; and am far, very far, from wishing to quit the unobtrusive station I at present occupy of one of the taught, for the more conspicuous one of that of a teacher. But I adventure the following animadversions, well knowing that the spontaneous remark of a child has not unfrequently proved useful to the sage; as the efforts of the tiny mouse are said to have been useful to the lion.

A talented minister of the New Church preached some time back to the congregation of which I am a member, and he took for his text the beautifully instructive parable of Luke, 14 chap. 7 ver. Mistaking the phrase "highest room," to mean "highest apartment," he went into an explanation of discrete degrees, showing that this phrase referred to the superior degree, and consequently, to the highest heaven, &c. A very little attention to the meaning of the letter would have sufficed to show him, that the word " room was not used here in the sense of "apartment," but in the sense in which it obviously appears in the following sentence :-Not finding room at this side, I sought for room at the other. Mr. Clowes, in his Gospel of Luke, translates it "seat," and place."*

* [The πрwтокdiσia denotes, the first recumbent seat at a feast-the place of honor. We will merely suggest, that the minister in question might probably have had the idea of simultaneous order, in which, the first or highest seat denotes the inmost, but But the term 66 according to successive order, the highest. room in the sense of "apartment," was certainly incorrect. Our common version has in many cases become obsolete; that is, certain words are now used in a sense different to that in which they were employed two hundred years ago, and other terms have fallen into disuse altogether. A more correctly expressed version is now wanted, but no translation can ever be equivalent to a knowledge of the original, which must always be appealed to as the real ultimate sense of the Word.-ED.]

Another talented minister has professed to give the spiritual sense of Thessalonians 1st., chap 4th., ver. 17.* And another has published + a sermon, in which the following passage occurs:

Solomon

says in Prov. chap. 10, ver. 1, 'that a wise son maketh a glad father: 'but a foolish son is heaviness to his mother.' How true is this, both in the natural and spiritual senses!" and the writer then actually proceeds to give the so-called spiritual sense!

Can these two latter writers be acquainted with the fact, that after enumerating the books of the Bible which constitute The Word, and in which list Proverbs and the Epistles are not included, Swedenborg emphatically adds " the rest have not the internal sense?"

In the first of these instances we see a teacher who, for want of obtaining a correct knowledge of the "basis, continent, and firmament" of the spiritual sense, gives one that is, in the case, purely imaginary; and, in the other two instances, we behold attempts made to evolve an internal sense from passages of which competent authority declares that they possess none. Allow me then, affectionately, and I trust in the ardour of a just zeal for the well-being of the Church, to ask, What must be the natural tendency of such erroneous proceedings? Does not the answer suggest itself to every mind, in the words, To undermine the belief in the existence of any real internal sense at all? Surely, the prevalent idea in the consummated Church that every attempt at the evolution of a sense interior to the letter, is at best but an effort of a luxuriant ingenuity, will thus be strengthened. And hence the great truth that there exists a real glory within the literal sense of the Word, existing as a soul in its body, will come to be more and more rejected as the chimerical and arbitrary invention of man, instead of being admitted to be, what in reality it is, "the result of an immutable law of nature, absolutely essential to, and inseparable from, the truly Divine style of writing." 2nd Dec. 1845, TZADDI.

* Report of the London Missionary Society for 1845, page 28. [It should be borne in mind, that although the Epistles have no spiritual sense, yet, whatever is quoted in them, either directly or indirectly, from the Gospels and other parts of the Word, has a spiritual sense. Now in the case alluded to by our correspondent, we think it evident, that when the apostle says,-" We shall be caught up in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air," &c., allusion is made to what the Lord said in Matt. xxiv., about his coming in the "clouds of heaven," &c. which Paul had heard from Peter and the other apostles.ED.]

In the New Church Advocate for November last, p. 361.

White Horse, n. 16.