62 



E. J. SEWELL, ESQ., ON THE 



first appeared obscure. We ought not to deprive young nations of 

 the benefits of a similar experience. 



Mr. J. C. Dick desired to thank the Lecturer for a most suggestive 

 paper and expressed regret that it was not already in print. Two- 

 points seemed to him to require a little more consideration than had 

 been accorded to them in the lecture. First, as to the rendering of 

 metaphor. Words like "horn," "mountain," "bowels," so fre- 

 quently found in the English translations, ought to have been 

 rendered either by appropriate English metaphors or by words 

 representing the ideas. Second, as to the supplying of the various 

 parts of the verb "to be." There were some six passages'* similar 

 in structure in the New Testament, where the copula was omitted 

 in the Greek. They consisted of a subject followed by two attri- 

 butes connected by kuI. The revisers had inserted the copula in all 

 the instances save one. Thus : " All things are naked and laid open 

 before the eyes of him with whom we have to do," and so with all 

 the others save one, which was thus rendered: "Every Scripture 

 inspired of God is also profitable." This rendering was simply bad 

 grammar, and even nonsense. Scripture (7/>a0>/) meant what was 

 contained in the Old and New Testaments and nothing more nor 

 less. But the assertion that anything was " also useful " implied 

 a previous assertion, and this the revisers had suppressed. Why 

 were they not consistent in translating the first passage, " All naked 

 things are also laid open before the eyes of him with whom we have 

 to do " 1 Why did they confine themselves to the omission of the 

 copula in only one of the six instances 1 Because they had a certain 

 motive which can be easily guessed. 



The Eev. J. Thomas, in expressing his high appreciation of the 

 paper, desired to put in a plea for accepting thankfully, under 

 certain circumstances, translations made into classic forms. Refer- 

 ence had been made to the " Chinese language." There is no such 

 thing as " the Chinese language." In Europe there are more than 

 eighty different languages. It would be a linguistic miracle if 

 China, which is one-third as large again, only spoke one. Classical 

 Chinese was a script, not a vernacular, and by rendering the 

 Scriptures into Classical Chinese, they gave it to all the literati of 



* Romans vii, 12 ; i Corinthians xi, 30 ; n Timothy iii, 16 ; Hebrews 

 iv, 13 ; ii Corinthians x, 10 ; i Timothy i, 15. 



