11 NOVEMBER 1865, Page 20

17te Oracles of God An attempt at Re-interpretation. Part L

By H. F. A. Pratt, M.D. (Churchill„)—Dr. Pratt's first step in the re-

interpretation of Scripture is to remove the Masoretic points from the Hebrew writing. His objection to them would seem to be that they give a distinct meaning to the words, which without them would con- stitute oracular utterances, i. e., utterances that are only intelligible to

those to whom God has willed-that the text should speak, He is oae of these favoured persons, and he describes, thus in the case of the

"radical idea symbolized by the letter r," the method of interpretation that has been vouchsafed to him. "To find this," he says, "create that letter into a stem by prefixing i and affixing e [quite arbitrarily]

two of the creative letters." Ire appears with its radical sense, " to project."

Now the form of the Hebrew Rosh, or; is that of the boomerang, the sym- bol of projection. . . . Thus taking projection as the basis of the primitive

idea represented by r; it will be found to permeate all the stems of which it

is the root, and to modify the sense of all the words into which it enters." In this way the author proceeds to " modify the sense" of a good deal of Scripture, the only drawback being that we have only his word for the new interpretations. Ho thinks, too, that the radical ideas sym- bolized by the Hebrew lettere are common to all languages ; thus the word church—" a very remarkable one, since when written in Hebrew characters it is the same whether read backwards or forwards"—pre- sents r, the symbol of progressive advance, enclosed between and as

it were guarded by eh (Cheth), the symbol of life, and thus conveys the "oracular utterance" (always double) of " Spirit causes to live," and " It causes spirit to live." In addition to these philological discoveries he has

a curious theory on the subject of angelic agency, which he thinks may be the "real source of the so-called natural or chemical and physical forces," angel opposing angel; but for this, and further information touching the "Revealed Cosmos," which is the title of the present volume, we must refer our readers to the work itself.