TIME was, when I know not what mystical meanings
were drawn, by a certain cabalistic alchymy, from the
simplest expressions of holy writ,-from expressions in
which no allusion could reasonably be supposed to any
thing beyond the particular occasion upon which they
were introduced. While this frenzy raged among the
learned, visionary lessons of divinity were often derived,
not only from detached texts of scripture, but from
single words,-not from words only, but from letters-
from the place, the shape, the posture of a letter: and
the blunders of transcribers, as they have since proved
to be, have been the ground-work of many a fine-spun
meditation.
It is the weakness of human nature, in every instance
of folly, to run from one extreme to its opposite. In
later ages, since we have seen the futility of those mystic
expositions in which the school of Origen so much
delighted, we have been too apt to fall into the contrary
error; and the same unwarrantable license of figurative
interpretation which they employed to elevate, as they
thought, the plainer parts of Scripture, has been used,
in modern times, in effect to lower the divine,
Among the passages which have been thus misrepre-
sented by the refinements of a false criticism, are all those
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