Page:Three introductory lectures on the study of ecclesiastical history.djvu/87

III] truth; the very violence which in successive ages has been put upon the sacred words; the attempts to warp them by false interpretation or by false teaching, or to overlay them by theories or forgeries of a later date, only bring before us in a more lively and instructive form what was the point from which we started, what is the difference of the point to which we have now arrived. In that coarse but instructive fable in which Dean Swift has described the development of Ecclesiastical History, when the father's will is at last brought out by the three brothers of the tale, nothing could more clearly impress upon them the sense of its true meaning than the recollection of the artifices by which they had been induced to discover in it the sanction of their own deviations from it. "If not totidem sententiis, then totidem verbis; if not totidem verbis, then totidem literis." So, with hardly an exaggeration, has Scripture been often handled. The next best clue to reading an oracle straightforwardly and honestly, is to be aware that we have been reading it backwards. The allegories of the early Fathers may be beautiful for their own special purpose, but they hardly profess to be expositions of the meaning of the sacred authors. The variations of reading, which copyists of later times have introduced into the text of the New Testament, are positive proofs that they found the actual words insufficient to express the altered views of their own age. The attention paid to passages manifestly of secondary importance, and the