1885 Watch Tower - A2Z.org

R796 : page 2without a prolonged course of preparatory acquisition.We are not to be supposed, for a single moment, to look withcontempt on any branch of inquiry. They all have their place in thecourse of a students preparation for life, and form part of thatmental discipline by which the human mind is enlarged andstrengthened. But, just as "critical analyses of the Englishlanguage,"--which have little to do with a plain man'scomprehension of his mother tongue--often create an impression onthe mind of the untaught that some mysterious light is by suchprocesses developed, so ordinary readers of Scripture are apt toconclude that, apart from critical investigations of the kind referredto, the Bible can never be properly understood. The eminentscholar, Dr. Maitland, thus wrote:"I must add my belief that the cumbersome apparatus of systematicinterpretation ought to be placed among the impediments to theright understanding of the word of God. The learning and laborwhich have been bestowed on it seems to me to have been worsethan wasted; and so far from its helping towards the understandingof the Word of God, it appears more calculated to puzzle andperplex the student, and to supply, to those who may desire it, themeans of confounding common sense and perverting the plain textof Scripture."These systematic schemes," he says, "are probably unknown tomost readers of the Bible, and therefore, do not directly form animpediment to them; but it is obvious, that complex machinerywhich they never saw, and could not understand, may have a greateffect on the manufactured article of which they are the consumers.Some persons, I believe, have thought that they put honor on theWord of God, and the language in which it is written, by telling usthat there is something 'in the original' which no translation canreach,--something not transfusible, expressible. No doubt this istrue as regards every language, and every book in every language,unless it is confined to the most common subjects, and written inthe lowest style.In most cases the curious felicity of one language cannot betransferred to another without using such paraphrases or makingsuch nonsense as is peculiarly infelicitous; but so far as regardsmeaning, where meaning is of importance, and the mode ofexpression of secondary consideration, or none at all, any themewritten in one language may be made intelligible in another,provided the things spoken of are known to the translator and theperson for whom he translates."For recent testimony in the same direction we turn to the Universityof Oxford, and there we find one of no mean eminence thusexpressing himself:--