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THE SECOND EPISTLE OF PAUL, THE APOSTLE,

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Timothy.

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5750. [

ii. 5.] At the Nemean games in Achaia, a garland of parsley was the victor's reward; doubtless, because it always preserves its verdure. You have an account of these games in AUSONIUS:

Quatuor antiquos celebravit Achaia ludos,
Coelicolum duo sunt, et duo festa hominum,
Sacra Jovis, Phoebique, Palæmonis, Archemorique :
Serta quibus pinus, malus, oliva, apium.

Aus. de Lustral. Agon.
Greece, in four games thy martial youth were train'd;
For heroes two, and two for gods ordain'd;
Jove bade the olive round his victor wave;
Phoebus to his an apple-garland gave:
The pine, Palamon; nor with less renown,
Archemorus conferr'd the parsley-crown.

ADDISON, on Medals, p. 153.

5751. [

ii. 15.] The light of the sun, not that of a taper, is decompoundable by the prism. Every physical and moral truth is the result of two contrary ideas. If, in decompounding such a truth, we confine ourselves to one of its elementary ideas, as to a detached principle, and deduce consequences from it, we shall convert it into a source of endless disputation; for the other elementary idea will abundantly supply consequences, diametrically opposite, to the person who is disposed to pursue them; and these consequences are themselves susceptible of contradictory decompositions, which go on without end. For example, if some one of our Reasoners, observing that cold had an influence on vegetation, should think proper to maintain that cold is the only cause of it, and that heat is even inimical to it, he would take care no doubt to quote the efflorescences and the vegetations of ice, the growth, the verdure, and the flowering of mosses in Winter; plants burnt up by the heat of the sun in Summer, and many other effects relative to his thesis. But his antagonist, availing himself, on his side, of the influences of spring, and of the ravages of Winter, would clearly demonstrate that heat alone gives life to the vegetable world. Yet the truth is, after all, that heat and cold combined form one of the principles of vegetation, not only in temperate climates, but to the very heart of the Torrid Zone.Every thing, except God, being thus composed of contraries, whoever affirms a simple proposition is only half right, as the contrary proposition has equally an existence in nature. St. PIERRE's Studies of Nature, vol. ii. p. 140.

5752. [2 Tim. iii. 3.] The number of foundlings in Paris amounts one year with another to six or seven thousand; whereas the number of children, not abandoned by their parents, does not exceed in that great city fourteen or fifteen thousand. St. PIERRE's Studies of Nature, vol. i. p. 367.

5753. [- -7.] "It may sound oddly, but it is true in many cases, that if men had learned less, their way to knowledge would be shorter and easier. It is indeed shorter and easier to proceed from ignorance to knowledge, than from error. They who are in the last, must unlearn, before they can learn to any good purpose: and the first part of this double task is not, in many respects, the least difficult; which reason it is seldom undertaken."

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5760. [2 Tim. iv. 3.] In the reign of Edward the First, the wage of a labouring man was three halfpence a-day. In 1274, the price of a Bible, fairly written, with a Commentary, was Thirty Pounds! That precious Volume, which may now be bought for one day's pay, it would then have cost more than 13 years' labor to procure. In 1240, the building of the two Arches of London Bridge cost but £25; five less than the value of the Bible.

5761.

Public Prints.

The Vandals, in their destruction of the Roman Empire, commenced the most relentless warfare on literature, to prevent it from handing to posterity a catalogue of their own crimes, and the knowledge of those refined arts and acquirements which had rendered so illustrious the name of the people they were seeking to destroy.

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Claudia, a Christian convert at the date of this Epistle 65, is with good reason thought to be the same identical Claudia so much celebrated by the poet MARTIAL for her beauty and virtue; and who is by him described as being both the wife of Pudens and a Briton.

See Martial, lib. v. epigram 13; and lib. xi. epigram 54.

Report says, there is in existence an old manuscript Welch chronicle of events, which attributes the introduction of Christianity into Britain to Charactacus (or Charadoc) the British General, who was taken prisoner A. D. 30, and carried to Rome, where he appeared before Claudius, with a deportment aud dignity which commanded the admiration of all present. Editor of CALMET.

Mr. KING, in vol. ii. of his Munimenta Antiqua, observes that " probably Aulus Plautius, the Pretor, who was sent into Britain by the emperor Claudius, as the very first governor of the province in this island, was the commander who laid the first stone here (Richborough in Kent) about the year 43; that very Aulus Plautius, whose celebrated wife, Pomponia Grecina, was one of the very first persous in Rome accused of having embraced Christianity; and who, having been tried, according to the Roman laws, for so embracing a strange foreign superstition, was pronounced honourably to be innocent of any thing immoral.

See TACITI Annales, lib. xiii. c. 32.

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THE EPISTLE OF PAUL, THE APOSTLE,

TO THE

Hebrews.

T

HIS is Paul's Eleventh Epistle.

It is probable, that the race of those who crucified the Messiah were extirpated root and branch in the general destruction, but that the Jews who lived in Rome at the time of our Saviour's crucifixion, and those who were scattered among the nations to whom the Apostle directs this Epistle, were the progenitors of these now alive.

which the Creator has distributed in that part of the universe,

are as numberless as the sands on the sea-shore.

See No. 1331, 1324.
Nat. Delin. vol. iii. p. 329.
The worlds] The ages, in the Greek.

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5778. [i. 2.] What these worlds are, might as The Case of the Jews, p. 18. well be left undetermined, GOD having thought fit to say This Epistle seems now, by common consent, to be little of them, and having placed them beyond our reach. as are also, by some, ascribed, not to Paul, but to Apollos, the five chapters of the first of Timothy. See Month. Mag. for March 1815, p. 143.

5776.

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i. 1, &c.] The Deity, say the Hindoos, has appeared innumerable times, in many parts of this world and of all worlds, for the salvation of his creatures; and though we adore him in one appearance, and they in others, yet we adore, they say, the same God, to whom our several worships, though different in form, are equally acceptable, if they be sincere in substance.

Works of Sir W. JONES, vol. i. 279.

P.

6777.[2.] If the fixed stars be actually so many Suns, which give light to a variety of other worlds, while they beautify ours; if the Milky Way be, as our telescopes assure us, an assemblage of suns, which lie at a still greater distance; we may boldly assert, that the planets or worlds

Yet Hevelius has given us the Geography of the Moon, and has marked out every mountain and valley, sea and river, as exactly as if he had been there, in his accurate Map of that World. Ricciolus has gone a little farther, assigning every Astronomer his proportion of ground: You may there meet with the Land of Copernicus,, Galilæus, Keplar; and of the modest Ricciolus, quartering himself on the best and most conspicuous spct of ground in that world!

Reflections on Learning, p. 110.

5779. [- 14.] There are continually attendant on man evil spirits, and also angels. By the spirits he has communication with the hells, and by the angels with the heavens (that are both more immediately around our earth). If those spirits and angels were to be removed from him, he would be in an instant without the power of willing and thinking, consequently without life.

SWEDENBORG, Arcana, n. 2887.

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