" NOT OF THIS WORLD."
[TO THE EDITOR OF TEE " SPECTATOR:1
SIR,-I have not read Mr. Baldwin Brown's book on Misread Passages of Scripture, but perhaps I can add to your notice of it a word or two not quite without interest. The meaning of Christ's words in John xviii. 36 is made abundantly plain by a simple reference to Matthew xxvi. 53. But now for a curious fact. I have just consulted four " reference " Bibles, and in neither have I found this particular reference. Oddly enough, I have found in two of these four, —one of the two being the Paragraph Bible of the Religious Tract Society,—a totally misleading reference to Luke xii. 14, a reference which bolsters up the very error which Mr. Brown condemns ! Compare, also, in connection with the two passages I have given, Acts i. 6 and 7, Matthew xxiv. 36, Mark xiv. 36, and Matthew xxvii. 46.
One word for a much abused man, long ago gone to the majority. I once heard the Rev. Robert Montgomery sensibly and forcibly attack the current construction, though he did not hit upon what appears to me to be the obvious reading supplied by Christ himself.
And one word, with your kind leave, on my own behalf. Through the badness of my MS. there are some fatal errors in my letter on " Art and Opinion." What Coleridge said was that
"pleasure, and not truth," was the immediate end of poetry. And in my fourth paragraph, the words " I allege " should read " To allege ;" while, in the fourth line of that paragraph, the words " assurely as if " should be " is surely as if."—I am, Sir, &c., MATTHEW BROWNE.
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