Pith in Exposition [pp. 619-636]

PITH IN EXPOSITION.
single new volume which shall be a bare succession of tolerably
accurate exegetical statements. But there is abundant room
for the great scholars. There is room for any crazy specialist
who will do as good work as Cruden did. And there is room
for Lmen who belong to the world as well as to the cloister, who
are familiar with men, who clearly see both what men need and
what they think they need.
1I. Again, exposition will not be properly pithy and valuacle
unless it is accurate.
The very fact that the popular expounder has a purpose to
accomplish in the use he makes of the truth, will often be a
temptation to him to be inaccurate. It is provoking to have to
spoil a good point for exactness' sake. When Longfellow
v rites
"Devoured by worms, like Herod, was the town,
Because like Herod, it had ruthlessly
Slaughtered the Innocents."
we greatly dislike to mar the neatness of the allusion, by
questioning whether the Herod who slaughtered the innocents
was the same Hlerod who was "eaten of worms."
When an earnest man clearly perceives that a given truth is
needed by certain people whom he is seeking to influence, and
thiavt there is a coincidence between this truth and a certain
forma of words in the Bible, it is not strange if he sometimes too
hastily uses such words for such purposes, without sufficiently
inquiring whether this is their real meaning. Instances occur
every week in which an expounder takes some truth, appropri ate enough in itself, and utters it, not as a suggestion raised by
the text, which it might be, but as a part of the meaning of the
text itself, which it clearly is not. Or a mere probability or
hypothesis slips into a point of view whence it is looked at,
nd reasoned from, as if it were a substantial certainty. Or
men make mistakes from lapse of memory, or from incor rectly estimating the weight of particular facts, or from letting
imagination take the place of reasoning. They are yet more
frequently and seriously misled by neglecting to use their imag inations, and consequently treating what is really a mental pic ture, as if it were a dry logical formula. Many are prejudiced
by some special bias. The mental vision of one is filled by the
doctrine of total abstinence or its opposite, that of another by
62b
l 874. 1