Page:Literature and Dogma (1883).djvu/120

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weight with the mass of mankind. Palpable error and mistranslation are what will have weight with them.

And what, then, will they say as they come to know (and do not and must not more and more of them come to know it every day?) that Jeremiah's supposed signal identification of Jesus Christ with the Lord God of Israel: 'I will raise to David a righteous Branch, and this is the name whereby he shall be called, the Lord our righteousness,' runs really: 'I will raise to David a righteous branch; in his days Judah shall be saved and Israel shall dwell safely and this is the name whereby they shall call them selves: The Eternal is our righteousness!' The prophecy thus becomes simply one of the many promises of a successor to David under whom the Hebrew people should trust in the Eternal and follow righteousness; just as the prophecy from Genesis is one of the many prophecies of the enduring continuance of the greatness of Judah. 'The Lord said unto my Lord,' in like manner;—will not people be startled when they find that it ought instead to run as follows: 'The Eternal said unto my lord the king,'—a simple promise of victory to a royal leader of God's chosen people ?

3.

Leslie, in his once famous Short and Easy Methods with the Deists, speaks of the impugners of the current evidences of Christianity as men who consider the Scripture histories and the Christian religion 'cheats and impositions of cunning and designing men upon the credulity of simple people.' Collins, and the whole array of writers at whom Leslie aims this, greatly need to be re-surveyed from the point of view of our own age. Nevertheless, we may grant that some of them, at any rate, conduct their attacks on the current evidences for Christianity in such a manner as to give