An Apology for the Septuagint, in which its Claims to Biblical and Canonical Authority are briefly stated and vindicated. By E. W. Grinfield, M. A. [pp. 541-557]

Grinfield's Apology for the Septuagint. [OCTOBER
constitutional difference in the national mind, is forbidden by
the fact that it has not always been so, and that even the
most ordinary English theologians and interpreters of scripture in the seventeenth century were as formal and methodical as those of Germany are now. The true solution, we believe, is furnished by the different modes of education and of
authorship which now prevail in the two countries. While
the English candidate for orders, until very lately, might be
said to have no systematic training for his work, nor any
training at all beyond the course of his own desultory reading,
the German student of theology is marched, with military
rigour and precision, through a whole encyclopedia of "sciences" and "disciplines," primary, subordinate, and auxiliary.
With the merits of the two modes of professional study we
have nothing here to do, but only with their several effects on
the externals of professional authorship; and these effects are
obvious enough. They are rendered still more marked, however, by the concurrent action of another cause, closely connected with the one just mentioned, but still less remote.
This is the difference in what a German would call the genesis of books in the two cases. As a general rule, all German
works, on learned or professional subjects, are the work of
teachers, and grow directly out of their instructions. The
university professor prints his lectures, the gymnasial rector
or conrector his synopses and collections. originally made for
the use of his own pupils. So fixed and settled is this practice, that a work of any learning, or of much pretension to it,
by a parish minister is always viewed with some disfavour,
and the cases of such men as Bretschneider, Bahr, and Kliefoth, who have risen to high places in the church by literary
no less than by clerical accomplishments, are perhaps mere
exceptions to a general rule. This academic or scholastic
origin of most learned German works affords'a further expla
nation of the elementary preciseness and formality by which
they are externally distinguished. Even where the name and
outer garment of the lecture or the text-book is discarded, the
simplicity with which the learned man begins at the beginning
of his subject, and assumes the mind of his reader to be a tabula
rasa with respect to it, and proceeds with measured step from
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