Ib. p. 26-7.

The Prophet Isaiah, too, clearly inculcates the spirituality of the Godhead in the following declaration:  ’But Egypt is man, and not God:  and their horses flesh, and not spirit’. (c. xxxi. 3.) * * *.  In the former member the Prophet declares that Egypt was man, and not God; and then in terms of strict opposition enforces the sentiment by adding, that their cavalry was flesh, and not spirit; which is just as if he had said:  ’But Egypt, which has horses in war, is only a man, that is, flesh, and not God, who is spirit’.

Assuredly this is a false interpretation, and utterly unpoetical.  It is even doubtful whether [Hebrew:  unable to transliterate. txt Ed.] (’ruach’) in this place means ‘spirit’ in contradistinction to ‘matter’ at all, and not rather air or wind.  At all events, the poetic decorum, the proportion, and the antithetic parallelism, demand a somewhat as much below God, as the horse is below man.  The opposition of ‘flesh’ and ‘spirit’ in the Gospel of St. John, who thought in Hebrew, though he wrote in Greek, favours our common version,—­’flesh and not spirit’:  but the place in which this passage stands, namely, in one of the first forty chapters of Isaiah, and therefore written long before the Captivity, together with the majestic simplicity characteristic of Isaiah’s name gives perhaps a greater probability to the other:  ’Egypt is man, and not God; and her horses flesh, and not wind’.  If Mr. Oxlee renders the fourth verse of Psalm civ.—­’He maketh spirits his messengers’, (for our version—­’He maketh his angels spirits’—­is without a violent inversion senseless), this is a case in point for the use of the word, ‘spirits’, in the sense of incorporeal beings. (Mr. Oxlee will hardly, I apprehend, attribute the opinion of some later Rabbis, that God alone and exclusively is a Spirit, to the Sacred Writers, easy as it would be to quote a score of texts in proof of the contrary.) I, however, cannot doubt that the true rendering of the above-mentioned verse in the Psalms is;—­’He maketh the winds his angels or messengers, and the lightnings his ministrant servants’.

As to Mr. Oxlee’s ‘abstract intelligences,’ I cannot but think ‘abstract’ for ‘pure,’ and even pure intelligences for incorporeal, a lax use of terms.  With regard to the point in question, the truth seems to be this.  The ancient Hebrews certainly distinguished the principle or ground of life, understanding, and will from ponderable, visible, matter.  The former they considered and called ‘spirit’, and believed it to be an emission from the Almighty Father of Spirits:  the latter they called ‘body’; and in this sense they doubtless believed in the existence of incorporeal beings.  But that they had any notion of immaterial beings in the sense of Des Cartes, is contrary to all we know of them, and of every other people in the same degree of cultivation.  Air, fire, light, express the degrees of ascending refinement.  In