by traill

Here's a quote attributed to Traill, in the Gospel Standard magazine (March 2006). It's short on purpose cos something funny's been going on with the internet connection here.

What should a sinner do but go to Christ? What can come of a sinner if Christ receive him not? Yea, what is a Saviour of sinners for, but for receiving sinners and saving them from their sins? ... [However] no one can see any glory in that grace of Christ which he has no sight or sense of his own need of.

Robert Traill was a Covenanter (I think) and the Banner of Truth has republished at least some of his writings.

having scruples

Here is a comment by Rev S Pike, who with S Hayward made up an interesting duo of London ministers in the 1750s. They held weekly lectures where members of the audience were able to submit questions about their religious experience and activities, and in 1755 they published the responses which they gave to some of those questions.

This one deals with the Christian attitude to 'diversions,' or ways of passing the time - if I feel uncomfortable about participating in a given social practice, do my scruples arise from an unnecessarily sensitive conscience, or a conscience which is being warned by God? NB, it uses the term "professor" to refer to 'someone who professes to be converted,' or claims to be a Christian.

[You can be sure that] This diversion, with every other, must certainly be evil when it unfits the soul for spiritual duties. It is readily granted that some diversions are certainly lawful; and it is as readily allowed that some diversion is really necessary: but then it is [necessary] only so far as it is suited to unbend the mind for a season from severer thought, or to relax the body to render it the more capable to perform necessary duty. Diversion is graciously allowed and designed to fit the body and mind for spiritual and natural duties.

But surely a gracious person must acknowledge the following maxim to be just: That whatsoever diversions do actually unfit the frame and spirit of the mind for devotional exercises, they so far [ie to the extent that they do so] prove themselves to be hurtful and criminal. And therefore, every person that has any regard for the power of godliness in his own soul must judge and condemn himself as guilty before God, whenever he engages in such diversions, or [engages in them] to such a degree as to unfit his soul for this communion with God.

And if every professor did seriously attend to this rule, and examine himself by this test, I doubt not but he would soon be obliged to decline this practice from his own experience.

The particular 'diversion' which was addressed in the original was playing cards, I think particularly when money was involved, but the bit I've quoted here outlines a principle which is valid across the board.

Pike and Hayward's original book, Cases of Conscience, was published in 1755. I've quoted this from the abridged version, published in 1968 by Free Presbyterian Publications (p36).

safety first

You know those annoying little ties you get when you buy boxes of plastic food bags? Little pieces of wire wrapped in white plastic? I've always hated them. Always.

Today I didn't even notice one on the freezer bag which I was meant to pop in the microwave and defrost.

Not even when I got this whiff of Something Which Might Potentially Be Burning did it twig what might be going on.

But when I as a matter of course paused the microwave to check on its contents, it was to discover two spikes of bare metal cheekily appearing from the neck of the plastic bag.

The white plastic covering had completely melted away, sealing the bag shut at the neck and exposing the ends of the tie. Without any sparking and without any giveaway flames.

I'm assured that it's not the first time this has happened. But it's still scary, and it's definitely confirmed me in my campaign against these things. Fiddly, unnecessary, and indeed dangerous: I'll tie my freezer bags in knots, thank you very much.

silent reading

One of my favourite journal article titles is: Writing is a Technology which Restructures Thought. It was written by Walter J Ong, who turned out to be a Jesuit priest, and it's full of fascinating insights into how much our understanding of what language is like is shaped by our familiarity with written language. It's roughly in the same category as Jack Goody's Interface Between the Written and the Oral, Marshall McLuhan's Gutenberg Galaxy and, even better for my purposes, Per Linell's Written Language Bias in Linguistics. It had such a reassuring and thought-provoking effect when I read it, and I read it at a particularly useful time for deciding what sort of things to do research about.

However, it turns out that there is one thing which Walter J Ong may have been misguided on, and that is his view of the way that people used to read their literature in ancient times. He suggested that people didn't use to read things silently to themselves the way we do - instead they would read out loud, at least till after printing was invented and printed text became more widely available.

This strikes me as quite a widespread belief - I'm sure I was vaguely familiar with the suggestion before reading it there, from sources outside of the linguistics world which I've no recollection of processing, and any fleeting scepticism I might have had would have been stifled by considering that silent reading must just be one of those skills of the contemporary world which is only easy when you know how.

But it turns out that the evidence in favour of this suggestion is really pretty scarce - and in fact it's probably not true at all. In the Books supplement of last Saturday's Guardian there was an article by James Fenton which puts the record straight. (Yes, I had been planning to say something about this since last Saturday.) He gives enough information in the article to make it possible to track down two published articles which argue that people like Augustine, Ambrose, and Alexander the Great were all in the habit of reading silently, and that it's a myth that their contemporaries were surprised to see it. He even mentions that a key moment in Augustine's conversion occurred through a time of silent reading (disappointingly, he doesn't say what specifically he was reading!).

I'm very much attracted to this version of events, partly because it rescues 'the ancients' from one more opportunity to denigrate their intellectual and cognitive achievements, but also because it's more consistent with the point (made from the 1910s onwards by an English scholar called Henry Bradley) that skilled reading does not necessarily depend on particularly close links between written symbols and their pronunciation - no transcription system known to mankind is capable of rendering speech exactly, and being able to produce a spoken version of printed symbols isn't even a particularly efficient way of recovering meaning from text.

James Fenton's article is available here, and these are the two articles which he cites:

• AK Gavrilov (1997), 'Techniques of Reading in Classical Antiquity.' Classical Quarterly 47: 56-73
• 
  MF Burnyeat (1997), 'Postscript on Silent Reading.' Classical Quarterly 47: 74-76

(They're both in JSTOR, the digital archive of academic journals, but you'll need a subscription to access them.)

It's not exactly central to my thesis to establish the answer to this point definitively, but I'm already planning to get a footnote out of it somewhere along the line. If I ever get to the stage of writing up, that is.

the nobleman and the centurion: Trench cites Chrysostom

Richard Trench has a chapter on the healing of the nobleman's son (John 4: 46-54) in his Notes on the Miracles of our Lord. He compares this incident with the one where the centurion came for healing for his servant (told in Matthew 8 and Luke 7). He says that when the nobleman asked for Jesus to come to his house, the reply he got ("Except ye see signs and wonders you will not believe,") shows that his petition was mixed with unbelief - in contrast to the centurion, asking on behalf of his servant, who believed with humility that Jesus was able to heal just by speaking a word.

A comparison of the Lord's dealings with this nobleman and with the centurion of the other gospels is instructive. Assuredly He has not men's persons in admiration who comes not, but only sends, to the son of this nobleman, Himself visiting the servant of that centurion. And there is more in the matter than this. Here, being entreated to come, he does not; but sends His healing word; there, being asked to speak at a distance that word of healing, He rather proposes Himself to come; for here, as Chrysostom explains it well, a narrow and poor faith is enlarged and deepened, there a strong faith is crowned and rewarded. By not going He increases this nobleman's faith; by offering to go He brings out and honours that centurion's humility. (p129)

There are several pairs of incidents like that which have some surface similarities but which are dealt with differently. Maybe the most noticeable of these comes out in the responses of Mary and Zachariah to the message of the angel in Luke 1 - they both responded with the question, How? But (as I've heard it explained anyway) Mary was asking for her faith to be supported, and so she was rewarded, but Zachariah was asking for his disbelief to be refuted, and he was censured.

Trench was an archbishop sometime around the end of the 19th century and early 20th. In my notes of lectures on lexicography in the Late Modern period, he is named as one of the prime movers behind the development of the New English Dictionary, having published two seminal papers on the inadequacies of existing dictionaries (or that's what it seems to say, now that I've deciphered the scribbly lecture handwriting). In addition to his Notes on the Miracles of our Lord he also wrote a book of Notes on the Parables of our Lord, and he also published books on New Testament Greek. In Christ's Doctrine of the Atonement, however, George Smeaton seems to politely disagree with some view that he held, which he seemed to mention in the same breath as some of the more dubious German theologians.