that the Messiah, promised solemnly by God was to be withheld, because persons loved, embraced, and absorbed him spiritually before his coming.

2. The Jewish doctors themselves did not understand the words of Hillel in Lightfoot's sense; and from their reply, who were certainly the best judges, it follows that either they did not understand Hillel's expression, so that he must be said to have departed from the usus loquendi, or intelligible forms of speech, or else that their meaning was one. every way inapplicable to John vi. In either cases the passage can have no weight against us. These are the words of the Talmud:“Rab said, Israel will eat the years of the Messiah [the gloss explains this by the abundance of the times of the Messiah will belong to Israel!]; Rab Joseph said truly, but who will eat of Ir? [the abundance]. Will Chillek and Billek eat of IT? This was said to meet the saying of Hillel," &c.*

The Rabbins, therefore, understood the words of this doctor, not as applying to the Messiah, but to the abundance of his times;

Sanhedrim, fol. 98. 2. Apud Lightfoot, ibid.

and then the figure is not in the eating, but in the word Messiah. Did they understand him rightly? Then Lightfoot's interpretation is totally wrong, and no parallelism exists between these words and those of our Saviour. For he certainly did not mean to inculcate the necessity of eating the abundance of his times. Did they misunderstand Hillel, and was it only Dr. Lightfoot who first arrived at his meaning? Then it follows that Hillel, in these phrases, departed from the intelligible use of language, and consequently ceases to be a criterion for explaining it. Add to this, that even allowing that Hillel could have meant, by eating the Messiah, receiving and embracing him, the expression to eat the flesh of the Messiah, is totally different. For I have already observed repeatedly, that, in conventional metaphors, the least departure from established phraseology plunges us into obscurity and nonsense. Take a parallel instance which comes across my mind. When Pope says

"He kept the money, so the rogue was bit,”

we understand immediately what to bite means in this passage, for it is a conventional

metaphor; but had he made here the alteration above supposed, and said the "rogue's flesh was bit," would the phrase have been any longer vernacular or intelligible? In like manner, if to eat the Messiah could have been understood by Hillel and his Rabbins, in Lightfoot's sense, because it was a conventional phrase, the addition of "eating the flesh of the Messiah," would totally change the phrase, and make it no longer comprehensible. I have, in fact, demonstrated, that to eat the flesh of a person had its own determinate, invariable, and conventional figurative signification; and from this, if you turn to figures, you have no right to depart. If I had to give an opinion upon the words of Hillel, I should say that they belong to that class of inexplicable things wherewith the Talmud abounds, most aptly indeed contrived for amazing, mystifying, and utterly confounding its readers, but not much calculated to instruct or to enlighten them. It is one of those hard shells which the Rabbins seem to delight in throwing into their scholars' laps, so hard, indeed, that they cannot by any possibility be cracked; and consequently there is no danger of their ever

bringing it to a decision, whether they contain a kernel,

"For true, no meaning puzzles more than wit.'

For us, it suffices that we can prove them utterly worthless, when used against us by even such powerful men as Dr. Lightfoot.

LECTURE III.

SECOND ARGUMENT FOR THE REAL PRESENCE, FROM
THE SIXTH CHAPTER OF ST. JOHN FROM THE PREJU-
DICES OF THE JEWS REGARDING HUMAN FLESH AND
BLOOD. THIRD ARGUMENT; FROM THE MANNER IN
WHICH THE JEWS UNDERSTOOD OUR SAVIOUR'S WORDS,
AND FROM HIS REPLY: OBJECTIONS TO THIS PROOF
ANSWERED.

IN
In my last lecture, I analyzed the phrases.
used by our divine Saviour in the two
divisions of his discourse, in order to dis-
cover the ideas which they could convey
to his hearers; and the result was, that
while the expressions used in the first part
were well selected to teach the necessity
and advantages of listening to his doctrines,
those of the second must have led the Jews
astray, if they were meant to convey any doc-
trine but that of the Real Presence.

The second argument, which I now proceed to treat, is founded upon a reflection