LYMAN— BRIEF NOTES. 629 



out by the internal evidence. An omniscient god would speak with 

 yet greater wisdom than the wisest man. A wise lawyer exerts 

 his utmost skill to express his meaning clearly and simply, beyond 

 the possibility of misunderstanding, or of twisting, avoiding hyper- 

 bole, or any kind of exaggeration, or possible obscurity. We do 

 not find such language in the gospels ; and, indeed, it would be alto- 

 gether foreign to their Asiatic authorship. We find there quite 

 seriously the monstrous hyperboles of swallowing a camel, of hav- 

 ing a wooden beam in the eye, of a camel's going through the eye 

 of a needle, of heaping coals of fire on the head ; all well enough as 

 jokes, like the description of the Green Mountain road so steep that 

 "greased lightning could not go down it without the breeching on." 

 But the free use in earnest of such expressions suggests a like ab- 

 sence of literal meaning for other words, such as the removal of a 

 mountain by sufficient faith. The trouble comes when it is to be 

 decided where such free interpretation shall be applied. Is it 

 meant to be taken literally that we should swear not at all ; that, 

 when we are struck on one cheek, we should turn the other cheek ; 

 that we should out and out love our enemies ; that we should exactly 

 do to others what we wish them to do to us? The general secular 

 decision in Christendom on such points has been that the injunctions 

 were not to be taken altogether literally. Yet marty simple, honest, 

 straightforward individuals have been inclined to insist that the 

 expressions should be taken literally; for the word of God could 

 have been uttered only in a strictly literal sense, not to be in any 

 way perverted or twisted. 



Classical Education. 



Much has justly been said of the beneficial effect of the cultiva- 

 tion of literary taste and of the enrichment of the mind from ac- 

 quaintance with classical books, masterpieces that have outlasted 

 many centuries ; and something has been said of the advantage of 

 classical linguistic knowledge. But too little seems to have been 

 said of the logical downright need of studying the classics as a help 

 towards a thorough understanding of our own language, and to- 

 wards easy and correct reasoning. 



