First, a difficulty has been fancied to exist in the words, as if our Lord had bade his disciples to do two contradictory things:  telling them, first, to sleep on and take their rust, and then saying, “Rise, let us be going.”  And because in St. Luke’s account, when our Lord comes to his disciples the last time, his words are given thus, “Why sleep ye? rise and pray, that ye enter not into temptation:”  therefore, as I have said, his words in the text have been translated, “Are ye sleeping and resting for the remainder of the time?” Now, I should not take up your time with things of this sort, where I believe our common translation to be most certainly right, were it not for the sake of one or two general remarks, which I think may not be out of place.  It is a general rule, that in passages not obscure, but appearing to contain some moral difficulty, if I may so speak; that is, something which seems inconsistent with our notions of God’s holiness, or wisdom, or justice; something, in short, of a stumbling-block, which we fear may occasion a triumph to unbelievers; it is a rule, I say, that in passages of this kind the difficulty is not to be met by departing from the common-received translation.  And the reason of this is plain; that had not the commonly received translation in such cases been clearly the right one, it would never have come to be commonly received.  Amongst the thousands of interpreters of Scripture, all, from the earliest time, anxious to remove grounds of cavil from the adversaries of their faith, a passage would never have been translated so as to afford such a ground, if the right translation of it could have been different.  Such places are especially those in which the common translation needs not to be suspected:  and it is merely leading us astray from the true explanation of the apparent difficulty, when we thus attempt to evade it by tampering with the translation.  A notable instance of this was afforded some few years since in a new translation of some of the books of the Old Testament; in which it was pretended that most of those points which had been most attacked by unbelievers were, in fact, mere mistranslations, and that the real meaning of the original was something totally different; and, in order to show the necessity of his alterations, the writer entirely allowed the objections of unbelievers to the common reading; and said that no sufficient answer had been or could be made to them.  This was an extreme case, and probably imposed only on a very few:  but less instances of the same thing are common:  St. Paul’s words about being baptized for the dead, have been twisted to all sorts of senses, from their natural and only possible meaning, because men could not bear to believe that the superstition of being baptized as proxies for another could have existed at a period which they were resolved to consider so pure:  and so in the text, a force has been put upon the words which they cannot bear, in order to remove a supposed contradiction:  and all that would have been gained by the change would be, to have one instructive illustration the less of our Lord’s peculiar manner of discourse, and one instance the less of the inimitable way in which his language, addressed directly to the circumstances before him, contains, at the same time, a general lesson, for the use of all his disciples in all ages.