death and eternal misery upon millions of his unborn, innocent posterity!

Having, as I suppose, sufficiently exposed the enormity of a doctrine so very derogatory to the moral character of the Deity, and so highly injurious to mankind (it being to my certain knowledge, the prolific parent of deism and infidelity) I shall now proceed to investigate and explain some of the causes of these errors, especially as those which are most prolific, are the most concealed from observation or detection. I mean, in the first place, the great difficulty the Apostles must have experienced, arising from the deficiency of appropriate terms in the Greek language, to express or convey many ideas contained in the Christian system of theology, that had never entered into the mind of a Grecian.

And secondly, the difficulty of translating new coined terms, or circumlocutive language; for, when we allow that the original authors were inspired, we are certain that the translators were not. And I am confident that if the experiment should be made, by taking six lads of the most different religious persuasions, and let them study the Greek language, and the principles of their various discordant professions, under the direction of their most able Ministers,

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until they were thirty years old, and then set them separately to translate the New Testament from six of the oldest Grecian copies, into English, every one of the translations would differ from the other. Of the truth of this allegation, we require no better evidence than to attend to the various discordant explanations given to the same passages of scripture in the English translation of the New Testament, by good English scholars of different persuasions; they will try to bend the text to make it accord with their own principles; but where this cannot be done, they will contrive, by every possible méans, to explain away its plain, literal, grammatical sense, by giving it a spiritual, or figurative, or metaphorical, or parabolical, or synecdochal meaning, or, indeed, any meaning but the right one. This last trope is very useful to them, by which the whole is put for a part, or a part for the whole for when John tells his disciples that Christ was the lamb of God, who taketh away the sin of the world. And again, that he is the propitiation for the sins of the whole world.... that the Father sent the Son to be the Saviour of the world....that Christ is the head of every man....that he gave himself a ransom for ali.... that he tasted death for every man....that God was in Christ reconciling the world unto himself....that Christ died for all....that the free gift

came upon all men to the justification of life.... that every knee shall bow to Jesus, and every tongue confess that he is Lord, to the glory of God....that he concluded all in unbelief, that he might have mercy upon all....that Christ promised that if he should be lifted up from the earth, he would draw all men unto him, even all that are in Heaven, and that are on earth, and under the earth, and in the sea, and all that are in them, shall unite with one voice in ascribing blessing, and honour, and glory, and power unto him that sitteth upon the throne, and unto the lamb forever and ever: The Partialists insist that these gracious promises which are made to the whole world, to every man, to all men, to every creature, that every knee shall bow, and every tongue confess, that all that are in Heaven, and all that are on the earth, and under the earth, and all that are in the sea, should be expounded synecdochally, to mean but a very small part, and not the whole for

Synecdoche the whole for part doth take,
Or part for whole, just for the metre's sake.

But if the use of such vague, indeterminate language be allowable in communicating our ideas in rhyme, on some light, trivial subject, it certainly cannot afford a laudable precedent

for delivering the sacred truths of the gospel, in prose, in the same vague style.

But when they find themselves hard pressed to defend their favourite doctrine of eternal damnation, which they call the gospel, that is, glad tidings to all men, they endeavour to collect as many texts to set in array against both scripture and common sense, as they can find; many of which have been fabricated out of a false translation of the Greek word aion, which prop. erly signifies an age, but which they have made to convey very opposite ideas from what is contained in the original, as I shall endeavour to prove by some extracts taken from a book written by Doctor Stonehouse, in England, who ap pears, by his works, to have possessed a critical knowledge of the Hebrew, Greek, Syriac, and Latin languages. It is written in letters (to a person who was also a good linguist ;) in which he has detected and exposed the errors in the common translations, both in the Old and New Testaments; from which false translations many of these erroneous doctrines have originated, and have since been maintained, especially by the false translation of the word olem in Hebrew, and the word aion in Greek. And I have discovered but one place, viz. Ephesians ii. 7. where the words aion, or aionios, has been truly

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rendered, to wit, that in the ages to come, &c. They saw that it would be absurd to render it, that in the eternities to come, &c. neither would it accord with their principles to say, that in the world or worlds to come: they were therefore obliged, for once, to translate it properly.

But before I begin to recite the demonstrative arguments of Dr. Stonehouse, I shall endeavour to point out some of the almost invincible difficulties which both the Apostles and translators had to encounter. It is well known that every science must have many peculiar technical terms, without which one person cannot communicate their ideas clearly to another. When Christianity was first promulgated, there was nothing similar to many of its institutions and doctrines to be found, either in the Jewish theology, or Grecian mythology; and therefore there could not have been a sufficient number of precise words in the Greek language, whereby the Apostles could convey their ideas clearly, even to a native Grecian; for it would be preposterous to imagine, that any people would have coined words to represent ideas which had never entered into their minds.. It is therefore evident, that the Apostles who wrote in Greek, must either have coined new words to convey new ideas, or made use of circumlocutive lan