Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: III. THE INTELLECTUAL AS WELL AS MORAL COMPASS OF METANOIA. So far as we have now gone we have probably done more to awaken the reader’s attention to the question of the inadequacy of repentance
as a rendering of
Metanoia, than to convince him that the position is rightly taken. We must go for the evidence of this to the Scriptures themselves; but, in doing so, let us recur first to our imaginary scholar whom we have supposed to be receiving his impression freshly from the original. Happily, as it turns out, we are not obliged to go even so far as to imagine such a scholar, for the impressions of an actual one of that kind came recently to our hand, which are in such singular coincidence with the view we are trying to present that we venture to quote them entire. We are glad, also, to avail ourselves of his brief dissertation as a guide in directing a part of the inquiry. That accomplished master of Greek, De Quincey (who, if any one ever did, held his mind clear and free in a scholarly consciousness of the transcendent atmosphere into which the Greek language rose when it was summoned to meet the necessities of Christian truth and the exigencies of divine inspiration), was, it seems, actually confronted by an intelligent friend with the very question which is now engaging us. The record of it will be found in his Autobiographic Sketches. 1
Lady Carbury, he writes,
one day told me that she could not see any reasonable ground for what is said of Christ, and elsewhere of John the Baptist, that He opened His mission by preaching ‘ repentance.’ Why ‘ repentance ’ ? Why then, more than at any other time? Her reason for addressing this remark to me was that she feared there might be some error in the translation of the Greek expression. I replied that, in my …
