SONNET. Be mindful, ye, who festive halls adorn, Who braids his tresses with the flowery twine, A. H. CORRESPONDENCE. The Editor begs to remind his readers that he is not responsible for the opinions THE RAINBOW A PROPHETIC SIGN. MIRACLES and prophecy are the usual means by which God has condescended to authenticate his communications with man. By miracles he afforded an immediate and visible assurance of some future event declared by prophecy. Among the chosen people, the dealings of Providence were laid more plainly open to observation; and the appointed instruments of the Almighty, for bringing about his ordained course of events, had their own faith strengthened, and their credit with others established, by some manifest sign from the finger of God. This was a wise and merciful adaptation to the feelings of human nature; indeed, it is impossible for us to conceive any other way that would so effectually obviate distrust on the one hand, and incredulity on the other. After the four hundred years of affliction, at the time prefixed (Gen. xv. 13.), when the children of Israel were to be brought up out of Egypt, and that unpromising charge was laid upon Moses, how natural was the expression of his feelings! "But, behold, they will not believe me, for they will say, The Lord hath not appeared unto thee," (Exod. iv. 1.) Upon which he was immediately furnished with the miraculous signs of the serpent-rod and the leprous hand, in token to himself and the Israelites of their approaching deliverance. Similar feelings and similar condescension were exhibited in the case of Gideon when commissioned to save Israel from the hands of the Midianites: "Wherewith shall I save Israel? . . . If now I have found grace in thy sight, then shew me a sign that thou talkest with me.' (Judg. vi. 15.) Then the angel of the Lord put forth his staff and touched the flesh, and there rose up fire out of the rock and consumed it. And when for wise purposes, God determined to raise up Hezekiah, and add fifteen years to his life, that king, with incredulous joy, said unto Isaiah, "What shall be the sign that the Lord will heal me?" (2 Kings, xx. 8.) And Isaiah said, "This sign shalt thou have of the Lord, that the Lord will do the thing that he hath spoken; and he brought the shadow ten degrees backward by which it had gone down on the dial." Such instances are numberless in the Bible, and the point to be attended to is that the sign was always something new or miraculous. This method of giving a present sign, as an authenticating token of a future benefit, was observed by God from the earliest times. It was so done in the person of Cain; the Lord shewed a sign unto Cain, in token that no man finding him should kill him, (Gen. iv. 15.)* This sign was certainly of a miraculous nature, and not an ordinary phenomenon; otherwise it would not have afforded him any more lively satisfaction than God's bare promise. If God had said unto him, I do set my sun in the heavens, and it shall be for a token that no man shall kill thee, what degree of assurance would such a sign have afforded to his desponding mind? Yet, of the same comfortless nature would have been the token of the rainbow to Noah, that the waters should no more become a flood to destroy all flesh, if that phenomenon had been familiar to the antediluvians. If the course of nature was violated to assure Hezekiah of the continuance of his life, is it an improbable supposition that God should do some new thing to convince Noah of his safety in a restored world. It is the remoteness of the transaction and our slight interest in it that reconciles us to the notion that God, at that time, merely appointed the bow as a token of his covenant. But God's dealings are constant, and a thousand years are only as one day in his sight; whilst man's judgment is powerfully influenced by the recentness of events and their importance to himself. If Christ had appointed the bow as a token of the resurrection of the body, and as a sign of the covenant between himself and mankind that he would make their peace with God, could we, in this case, bring ourselves to acquiesce in the sufficiency of such a pledge? But Christ knew better what was in man, and what the earnest longings of our nature required. When, therefore, he was asked "What sign shewest thou, seeing that thou doest these things? Jesus answered, Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up. He spake of the temple of his body," (John, ii. 18, Matt. xii. 39.) It is not likely, then, that the awful occasion of the deluge, wherein comfort and support were so much needed, should constitute the soli Gen. iv. 15, should be rendered "And the Lord gave Cain a sign [i. e. worked some miracle to convince him] that whosoever found him should not kill him.”— אות Parkhurst in voce tary exception to God's usual dealings. Because rain is common and necessary now, we are apt to suppose that it has always been so; except for this bias, I think that no one could consider the bow as a familiar appearance on reading the account of it in Gen. ix. 12—15: “And God said, This is the authenticating token, which I exhibit,† of the covenant between me and you, and every living creature that is with you, for perpetual generations; (13) My bow I exhibit in the cloud, and it shall be for the authenticating token of the covenant between me and the earth. (14) And it shall come to pass, when I bring a cloud over the earth, that the bow shall be seen in the cloud; (15) And I will remember my covenant, which is between me and you, and every living creature of all flesh; and the waters shall no more become a flood to destroy all flesh." In verse 14, Noah is specially advertised when and where he was to expect its appearance, as concerning some new thing; which notice that there should be rain, but not to the overflowing of a flood, will appear far from needless, when we consider the terror that must have seized on this remnant of a destroyed world, on a repetition of those wondrous and fearful waterdrops, and what unspeakable comfort God's predicted sign in the cloud would afford them: "The bow shall be in the cloud, and I will look upon it, that I may remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature." St. Paul classes Noah among those eminent persons who had exhibited extraordinary instances of faith: "By faith, Noah being warned by God of things not seen as yet, moved with fear, prepared an ark to the saving of his house," (Heb. xi. 7.) We know that, at present, heavy rains will sometimes produce floods, so as to inundate whole districts, and cause great loss of life; now if rains and floods were things not seen as yet, it adds greatly to his faith in building the ark, and in bearing the scoffs of that violent generation. Although the fountains of the great deep were broken up, yet rain seems to have been the principal agent of destruction, as God forewarned Noah: "yet seven days and I will cause it to rain upon the earth forty days and forty nights, and every living substance that I have made will I destroy from off the face of the earth," (vii. 4.) Now, if Noah were commissioned, unless they repented, to threaten that wicked race with the unheard of punishment of a flood from heaven, he would little disturb their godless revelry which they kept up, "eating and drinking, marrying, and giving in marriage, until the day that Noah entered into the ark," (Matt. xxiv. 38.) Kindred spirits of the present day scoff at Moses for asserting that The sign of God's covenant with Abraham was circumcision, (Gen. xvii. 11,) which, although not miraculous, was certainly new. We now know that the rainbow is the effect of natural causes; yet, were it at that time new, it would have all the effect of a miraculous sign to Noah. + The usual expression for shewing a sign is here used: in, didóvai onpetov. The Hebrew idiom here would be more properly rendered, "I will cause it to rain forty days, that I may destroy, &c. ;" also in ix. 13, "My bow I exhibit in the cloud, that it may be for, &c." God then set his bow in the cloud. The same causes, say they, must ever have produced the same effects; and the rainbow must often have been seen during the sixteen centuries before the flood. Such reasoning is correct enough; but, were the premises to be questioned, they would be rather at a loss to prove the existence of rain in those times, so little analogous to our own. We should never have believed, had it not been revealed to us, that the antediluvians ate no flesh, or that they lived so long; and yet, such a state of the atmosphere, as did not admit of the condensation of vapour into drops of rain, is not more impossible to conceive than such a constitution of the human frame, as did not require flesh for its support, and could stand the wear of a thousand years. If God has asserted that he did, at that time, exhibit his bow in ratification of his covenant, can unbelievers expect that we should give less heed to his sure word than to their unproved assertions? "Yea, let God be true, and every man a liar;" and as long as the Bible is not inconsistent with itself, the difficulty of reconciling it with the objections of its enemies need not cause us any great uneasiness. The only passage that bears in the least upon the subject is contained in Gen. ii. 4-6; but as the present version of it is very obscure, I shall here offer a new translation and arrangement :— "Such is the account of the heavens and the earth at their creation, Now before any shrub of the field was in the earth And watered the whole face of the ground." The first chapter, I conceive, should have been extended beyond the six days of creation, so as to contain the sanctifying of the seventh day to rest, and perhaps to end with the full close-"Such is the account of &c." The second chapter would then return to and amplify certain passages worthy of a particular account, but which would have interrupted the simple narrative of the creation such are the place of Adam's abode, the naming of the creatures, the different formation of Eve, &c. The meaning of the six lines "Now before any Two not uncommon idioms are here combined in an unusual manner, and on this account seem hitherto to have escaped observation : (1.) before, as in Josh. ii. 8—“Now before they had lain down, she went up unto them on the roof." (2.) 5, every, in a negative sentence, means any, as in Exod. xx. 4-" Thou shalt not make to thyself any likeness." Gen. iv. 15-"That not any finding him should kill him." Gen. iii. I-"Yea hath God said, Ye shall not eat of any tree of the garden!" And Eve's answer suits better hereto. The Hebrew in this case corresponds exactly with the Latin quisquam or ullus which are used only in universal negative propositions. Gen. iii. 1-" The serpent was more subtil than any beast," animali astutior ullo. The same idiom, où πãç, derived from the Septuagint, obtains also in the Greek Testament: "Not any flesh shall be saved," (Mark, xiii.20;) "Not any one that saith unto me Lord, Lord," (Matt. vii. 21,) Non intrabit quisquam qui dicat ; 1 Cor. i. 29, Heb. xii. 11, &c. shrub &c." appears to be simply this: Previously to the existence of any vegetation, although there was neither rain from heaven nor irrigation from man, yet God had provided the necessary supply of moisture by means of the atmosphere affording dew. SIR,-In the first volume of the British Magazine, it was observed at some length, that the miraculous fall of Babylon and rise of Cyrus the Great, had been extensively felt and remembered among the Gentiles; that the title of Quirinus, first king, and warlike deity among the Romans, was no other than Cyrus's name, and his legend, the fable of Cyrus's birth and nutrition,-and so forth. And it was further observed thereupon, that the Greek word Kupios, and all its cognates and derivatives, were introduced into the language subsequently to the wonderful events in question, and can, therefore, be referred with probability to no origin other than the proper name Kupos, Cyrus. Those words were distinguished with some care from an earlier word of a similar sound, but not only of a different, but of an essentially opposite import. The meaning and force of that new Grecian word was, "being arbiter of any question," "having jurisdiction over anything," and so forth; corresponding with the Latin idiom, penes quem aliquod est ; from which ampler sense, the common meaning of lord or king was deduced. But it is a word essentially kingly, implying the power of him who imposes law obligatory upon free citizens, and not the right of a master over slaves; and was considered peculiarly apt to express the supremacy of God over all beings. Cyrus is known to be a title of the sun, and the sun is known to have been worshipped by the Pagans under an infinity of names. Some of those names expressed the various attributes which really belong to it as the luminary of nature, and others expressed attributes belonging to God alone, and imputed to it under the false hypothesis of its being a deity of the first order. It followed as a necessary conclusion from the above premises, that the name Cyrus, as bestowed upon the deity Sol Mithras, was expressive of those precise rights and faculties which the Medo-Grecian words κυριος, κύρος, κυριεύειν, &c. denote. These few words of recapitulation are intended to introduce the following remark. Etymologists of the sounder and better class, and, Quem penes arbitrium est et jus et norma loquendi, i. e. ¿0oç kuptov isi των ῥησεων. |