But it is essential to all holy exercises. And wherever the truth penetrates, it dissipates the clouds of error, and brings every thing to view, so that when spiritually discerned it produces its proper effect on the soul. Truth being thus essential, it is the duty of Christians to bring it to bear upon all those who are ignorant and on all the works of darkness.
VY. 14. As light is thus efficacious, and as it is ae- cessible, or may be obtained, therefore the Scriptures call even upon the sleeping and the dead to arise and meet its life-giving beams. Ao λέγει, scil. ἡ γραφή. As this formula of quotation is never used in the New Testament except when citations are made from the Old Testament, it cannot properly be assumed that the apostle here quotes some Christian hymn with which the believers in Ephesus were familiar; or some apocry- phal book; or some inspired book no longer extant. We must understand him either as referring to many exhortations of the Old Testament Scriptures, the sub- stance of which he condenses in the few words here used; or as giving the spirit of some one passage, though not its words. Both these methods of explana- tion may be sustained by appeal to similar passages. The apostles in quoting the Old Testament sometimes combined several passages in the same quotation—and sometimes give as the teaching of the prophets what is nowhere taught or asserted in express terms, but is abundantly or clearly implied in what they say. At other times again, the reference is obviously to some one passage, and yet neither the Hebrew nor Septua-