the original sentence is throbbing with a life of its own, and aglow with the fascination of a personal history. This is rather the work of the commentator; and not of the commentator who explains the meaning and the relation of verses and chap- ters, but of one who deals with words in detail, and tells their individual stories.
For a language is not made to order and out of hand. It is a growth out of a people’s life; and its words are not arbi- trary symbols fixed by decree or by vote, but are struck out, as needed, by incidents and crises. They are the formulas in which new needs and first impressions of. external facts spon- taneously voice themselves, and into which social customs run. Hence language becomes more picturesque as we recede toward its earlier forms. Primitive speech is largely figurative; primi- tive words are pictures. As the language becomes the expres- sion of a more conventional and artificial life, and of a deeper and more complex thought, new words are coined representing something more subjective and subtle; and the old words, as they become pressed into the new service and stretched to cover a wider range of meaning, lose their original sharpness of out- line. They pass into conventional symbols in the multiform uses of daily speech; they become commonplace factors of a commonplace present, and remain historic only to lexicogra- phers and philologists. None the less, these words forever carry hidden in their bosom their original pictures and the mark of the blow which struck each into life; and they will show them to him who lovingly questions them concerning their birth and their history.
These remarks apply in a peculiar manner to the Greek lan- guage, which was the outgrowth of a national character at once poetic and passionate, logical and speculative, and which was shaped by an eventful and romantic history and by a rich and powerful literature. The words of a language which traverses the period from Homer to Aristotle, from Marathon to Leuc-
viil PREFACE.
tra; which told the stories of Herodotus, carried the mingled fire and logic of Demosthenes, voiced the tremendous passion of Oedipus, and formulated the dialectic of Plato and the rea- soning of Aristotle, must enfold rare treasures; and the more as we follow it into its later development under the contact of Oriental thought, which fused it in the alembic of Alexandria, ran the new combination into the mould of the Septuagint, and added the last element necessary to constitute it the bearer of the Gospel message. The highest testimony to the resources of this wonderful tongue is furnished in its exquisite sensitive- ness to the touch of the new faith, and its ready adaptation to the expression of the new truth. Its contact with the fresh, quickening ideas of the Gospel seemed to evoke from it a cer- tain deep-lying quality, overlaid till then by the baser moral conceptions of Paganism, but springing up in prompt response to the summons of Christian thought and sentiment. Yet even the words which lent themselves so readily to the new and higher message of Christianity could not abjure their lineage or their history. They bore the marks of the older and less sacred burdens they had carried. In the histories of its choicest words, Christianity asserts itself as a redeemer of human speech. The list of New-Testament words lifted out of ignoble associations and uses, and mitred as ministers of sacred truth, is a long and significant one; and there are few more fascinating lines of study than this, to which Archbishop Trench long ago directed English readers in his “Study of Words” and his “‘ New-Testament Synonyms.”
The biblical student may therefore profitably combine two distinct lines of study ; the one directed at the truth of script- ure in mass, the other at the medium or vehicle of the truth in detail. A thorough comprehension of scripture takes in the warp no less than the woof. Labor expended upon etymolo- gies, synonyms, and the secrets of particles and tenses, upon the wide range of pictures and hints and histories underly-