Thus the refrain would agree exactly with the two that follow (ver. 11 and 43:5).  Yet this conjecture, however plausible, is uncertain, since we do not know that the sacred writer sought exact uniformity in the three refrains.

9. General remark on the various readings of the sacred text.  As a general rule, the various readings with which textual criticism is occupied have respect to minor points—­for the most part points of a trivial nature; and even where the variations are of more importance, they are not of such a character as to obscure, much less change, the truths of revelation in any essential respect.  Biblical critics tell us, for example, that the Samaritan Pentateuch agrees with the Septuagint version in more than a thousand places where they differ from the Masoretic Hebrew text.  Chap. 16, No. 7.  Yet these three texts all exhibit the same God, and the same system of doctrines and duties.  Revelation does not lie in letters and syllables and grammatical forms, but in the deep and pure and strong and broad current of truth “given by inspiration of God.”  Reverence for the inspired word makes us anxious to possess the sacred text in all possible purity.  Yet if we cannot attain to absolute perfection in this respect, we have reasonable assurance that God, who gave the revelation contained in the Old Testament, has preserved it to us unchanged in any essential particular.  The point on which most obscurity and uncertainty rests is that of scriptural chronology; and this is not one that affects Christian faith or practice.

SECOND DIVISION:  PARTICULAR INTRODUCTION.

CHAPTER XVIII.

THE BOOKS OF THE OLD TESTAMENT AS A WHOLE.

1.  The province of Particular Introduction is to consider the books of the Bible separately, in respect to their authorship, date, contents, and the place which each of them holds in the system of divine truth.  Here it is above all things important that we begin with the idea of the unity of divine revelation—­that all the parts of the Bible constitute a gloriously perfect whole, of which God and not man is the author.  No amount of study devoted to a given book or section of the Old Testament, with all the help that modern scholarship can furnish, will give a true comprehension of it, until we understand it in its relations to the rest of Scripture, We cannot, for example, understand the book of Genesis out of connection with the four books that follow, nor the book of Deuteronomy separated from the four that precede.  Nor can we fully understand the Pentateuch as a whole except in the light of the historical and prophetical books which follow; for these unfold the divine purpose in the establishment of the Theocracy as recorded in the Pentateuch.  The Pentateuch itself gives us only the constitution of the Theocracy.  The books that follow, taken in connection with, the New Testament, reveal its office in the plan of redemption; and not till we know this can we be said to have an intelligent comprehension of the theocratic system.  The same is true of every other part of revelation.