circumstances seemed to call for it I have sometimes used two
English words to represent one word of the Greek;"--and he is
perfectly right. With a slavish literality delicate shades of
meaning cannot be reproduced, nor allowance be made for the
influence of interwoven thought, or of the writer's ever
shifting--not to say changing--point of view. An utterly ignorant
or utterly lazy man, if possessed of a little ingenuity, can with
the help of a dictionary and grammar give a word-for-word
rendering, whether intelligible or not, and print 'Translation'
on his title-page. On the other hand it is a melancholy spectacle
to see men of high ability and undoubted scholarship toil and
struggle at translation under a needless restriction to
literality, as in intellectual handcuffs and fetters, when they
might with advantage snap the bonds and fling them away, as Dr.
Welldon has done: more melancholy still, if they are at the same
time racking their brains to exhibit the result of their
labours---a splendid but idle philological _tour de force_ --in
what was English nearly 300 years before.

7. Obviously any literal translation cannot but carry
idioms of the earlier language into the later, where they will
very probably not be understood; /2 and more serious still is the
evil when, as in the Jewish Greek of the N T, the earlier
language of the two is itself composite and abounds in forms of
speech that belong to one earlier still. For the N.T. Greek, even
in the writings of Luke, contains a large number of Hebrew
idioms; and a literal rendering into English cannot but partially
veil, and in some degree distort, the true sense, even if it does
not totally obscure it (and that too where _perfect_ clearness
should be attained, if possible), by this admixture of Hebrew as