Page:The Emphasised Bible - Vol 1.djvu/13

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Scripture thoughts (which had to be presented somehow) after what appeared to him the most apt and helpful arrangement; about which no one is counselled to trouble himself prematurely or overmuch. This, however, is certain—namely, that a little perseverance will soon render it easy to the reader of this Bible to pay a profitable regard to the parentheses and digressions which so strikingly characterise the writings of the Apostle Paul. To a principal statement, he subordinates another; then, to that, another; and so on to such a degree that, although for a time we can comfortably indent more and more, yet at length the device of indentation comes perilously near breaking down; and to avoid being driven quite up to the right-hand margin, and so having no column at all left, we are constrained to use substitutionary initial capitals (as in Ephesians i. and Colossians i.) to indicate where further-indented new lines would begin if only there were room. Extreme indentation, as the initiated know well, is literally, in printing, an expensive luxury; but the student reaps the benefit, and his sense of triumph becomes a keen enjoyment as he watches the return of the great Evangelical Thinker to the point from which—a good while ago—he started. He confesses that his Guide has wandered; but he boasts that his Master never comes back empty. What, for example, though the entire Third of Ephesians is a parenthesis? The world would have been poorer without it. Furthermore, when industrious readers wake up to the gains which Logical Analysis promises to bring home, they may find themselves marking with the greatest interest the unexpected appearance of a similar Logical Idiom in the Book of Ezekiel to that which is found in the Book of Daniel—pursued to such a remarkable extent, in these two Books alone, as to give colour to the assumption that, after all, in spite of the contrary assertions of certain critics, the prophets Ezekiel and Daniel were very nearly contemporaries, just as the sacred history would naturally lead us to suppose they were.

is simply to invoke the assistance of the eye to give to that formula the dominating force over the announcement which follows which by the intention of the prophet it should naturally have. And so again there are cases in the Pentateuch and in the Prophets in which the oft-recurring formula, "As Yahweh commanded Moses," or "Declareth Yahweh," can be more becomingly appended, and with better effect, as a line by itself drawn towards the right hand, after the manner of a signature, than in any other way.

3. Varieties of type.—These have been but sparingly resorted to, partly on the score of economy, but chiefly because continual changes of type soon become annoying and even distressing to the eye. For these reasons Emphasis, in particular, has not been thus indicated. At the same time the discreet employment of other than the ordinary type has been made to answer a few very serviceable ends.