The Union Seminary Magazine, Vol. 16

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Excerpt from The Union Seminary Magazine, Vol. 16: 1904-1905 And we have used the word "exhibit, " rather than "explain, " because our purpose is not so much to set forth our own views of the "Revision of 1903, " as to bring the Revised Confession itself as clearly as possible before the reader's mind, that he may see for himself what its revision has effected. Of course we are not disclaiming the office of interpreter. It is rather this office that we would fain assume, and that in its purity, for it is precisely the function of the interpreter to exhibit the meaning of his text in its integrity. We are simply renouncing for the moment every other duty but that of interpretation, and, leaving history and criticism alike to one side, confining ourselves to the establishment of the actual sense of the Revised Confession as it lies before us. Scientific procedure in ascertaining the character of the Revised Confession coincides perfectly with the common-sense procedure of simply taking the Revised Confession up and reading it through consecutively, drawing out all its teaching in an orderly manner, and estimating it in its own light as a whole. The Revised Confession has just as much right to demand that it be read as a consecutive and consistent whole - part explanatory of part and the whole the resultant of all its parts - as has any other document. To it, as a constitutional paper in a given church, it is entirely immaterial whence its several parts have been derived, or in what debates they may have been beaten out. As they stand in the document, they form parts of its whole, affecting all the other parts and affected by them, and they must be dealt with accordingly. It follows, of course, that the meaning of no single clause of the Revised Confession can be determined in isolation, and that no one of its doctrines can be properly defined save as drawn out, in balanced form, from the entire document. And it is obvious that this applies just as truly to passages newly inserted into the Confession as to portions which have been constituent parts of it from the beginning. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.