[To TRIC EDITOR OF THE " SPBODATOR."] Sru.,—In the autobiography
of the late Mr. W. Bell Scott (Vol. U. p. 276-77) there is an interesting reference to this phrase. Mr. Scott believed that he had discovered its Hebrew orIgin. At the funeral of a friend in a Jewish burying-place, " on every upright stone I observed three Hebrew words inserted tOvvards the end of every inscription, the rest being in English. These words my informant, who was a Hebrew, told me were only translatable, May he rest in peace,' exactly the same formula as the Romanist inscription, Reguiescat in pace. They had been used, he said, by the Chosen People time out of mind. Why should this remain "still in use with no Christians, whose boast it is that immor- tality has been brought to light by the Gospel P—to whom, therefore, death is the opposite to an eternal sleep,—an awakening to a higher life. The truth seems to be that the earliest Christians in Rome were Jews, whose graves in the Catacombs continued to be so inscribed, and these again were imitated by later converts ; and so the form of inscription continued to be ignorantly followed by the Church, even down to this nineteenth century ! Such is the tenacity of life in ,religious usages when once they have become authoritative."
As giving some ground for the Hebrew origin of the phrase, the following sentence from Edereheim's Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah, Vol. II., p. 319, may be quoted :—" There ,are many inseriptions found on Jewish tombs out of Palestine (in Rome and other places) written in bad Greek or Latin, containing perhaps a Hebrew word, and generally ending with shalom (peace)."
Perhaps Mr. Scott did not see three Hebrew words, but only the three Hebrew letters making the word " shalom "
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