Page:The Name Lucifer.djvu/3

 (Is. XIV., 4). This king was either Nebuchadnezzar, because of his eminence, and his temporary abasement, or, more probably, Belshazzar, because, in his death and in the capture of his capital, the Babylonian empire, as one of the great sovereignties of the earth, came to an end. In either case the morning-star represented a human being only, one who held a prominent earthly rank and was brought down to the grave.

Let us look at a gem from that casket of jewels, Bungener's "Bourdaloue and Louis XIV." Claude was in the Avenue of the Philosophers, surrounded by Fénélon, Bossuet, Flêchier, and others. The subject of his discourse was the sublimity of the Scriptural ideas of death and the nothingness of man. He spoke: "The most beautiful funeral oration that I know is the famous chapter (Is. xiv). A king dies. The nation asks if it be really true. They were so accustomed to see him live as if he were never to die, that they had almost come to believe that he never could die. But he is really dead. They raise their heads. For the first time they dare to fix their eyes upon this countenance before which they have so long bowed themselves to the dust. They had transformed their monarch into a giant. And now that he lies low, a few feet of ground is sufficient for him. Scarcely were his eyes closed upon this world, when he must open them in another world, and be a witness of his own interment in the depths of the tomb. All the kings of the nations are come to meet him. To salute him? No, to mingle among the rest of the dead, and to contemplate him confounded among the nameless crowd. And then burst forth beneath the infernal vaults these voices, these cries, this terrible and solemn chant of the grave's equality, 'How art thou fallen from heaven!'"

Why was more sought, under the prophet's highly figurative language, than the announcement of a plain historical fact and a most solemn lesson? It is to be regretted that occasion, has been given for the indignant protest of Dr. Henderson: "The application of this passage to Satan and to the fall of the apostate angels, is one of those gross perversions of sacred writ which so extensively obtain, and which are to be traced to a proneness to seek for more in any given passage than it really contains."

This particular example of "gross perversion of sacred writ" is of an early date. Not as early, however, as that impliedly assigned by Nägelsbach, who appears inclined to hold the Septuagint responsible for the error, because in their translation they changed the second person of the Hebrew תלפת into the third of the Greek, the oratorical personal address into an exclamation of a general nature. By the change the eloquence of the prophet's apostrophe is sacrificed, but, still, in the view of the translators, the being to whom Isaiah refers may have been the human dethroned potentate only. Dr. Balthasar Bekker states, in his celebrated "The World Bewitched," that Athanasius, in his first and second books against the Arians, erroneously derives the overthrow of the devil from this text. Dr. Kitto declares that Tertullian and Gregory the Great, understood the prophet's language to refer to the same thing. The perversion of this passage probably originated at the beginning of the fourth century of the Christian era, and was adopted as sound interpretation by the theologians of the middle ages. The modern English commentators do not positively endorse it, but they seem indisposed to abandon it wholly, since it has become so firmly established in the minds of the readers of King James's version; and, indeed, of those of all other renderings of the original Scriptures. Scott says: "This