220 LIVES OF THE PURITANS. Testaments, by unskilful altering what God spake most divinely. The reading, therefore, of the apostles in these matters will call together Homer, Hesiod, yEschylus, Pin- darns, and others of the coasts of Illyricum : as also Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Aratus, Menander, Callimachus, Epimenides, Plato, Aristotle, and all the orators and historians of Grecian writing in the time when this tongue flourished.". He maintained that the gospel of St. Matthew was origi- nallywritten in Greek. " The New Testament," says he, " was all originally in Greek. St. Matthew's gospel was written at the first in that heavenly oratorious Greek which we now have: and if the Holy Ghost had written it in the -Jews' JerusalemHebrew, the holy learned of old time would have kept it with more care than jewellers all precious stones. We accuse antiquity of great ungodliness, when we say. St. Matthewwrote in Hebrew, but antiquity lost that gospel. So St. Paul wrote in Greek to the Hebrews, in those syllables which we have to this day ; and the style bath allusions, which the Jews' tongue bath not : which sheweth the original to be in Greek. The apostles wrote the New Testament in Greek, with such skill, that they go through all kind of Greek writers.' They have words in their little book, good Greek, which Greeks have only in fragments, reserved by God's providence to honour the New Testa- ment."t This is the high character which our divine gives of the elegance and purity of the apostolic writings. His senti- ments were equally exalted concerning the sacred records of the Old Testament. He made the following observations upon the Book ofJob : " There never was a book written," says he, " since the pen became the tongue of a writer, of a more curious style than Job; in verse of many sorts, and use of words more nice than any Greek or Latin wrileth ; and forgrammar, hath more tricks and difficulty than all the Bible beside, Arabizing much ; but fuller of Hebrew depth of language. God saw it needful to honour with a style of all ornaments the particular case of Job, lest it should be despisedor thought a feigned matter; and, therefore, gave that book a more curious style than any other part of the Bible; and such depth of skill in the tongue, as no rabbin could be thought ever to have in the holy tongue."t Mr. Broughton, as we have already intimated, fled to Biog. Britan. vol. it p. 006. + Ibid. p. 607. I Ibid. p. 609.
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