respect is a strong argument in favour of the more natural proportion of the Septuagint. But men in all ages have endeavoured to reduce the Antediluvian standard of human life and generation, without regard to the actual record of Holy Scripture. Some curious specimens of reasoning on this point will be found in Usher’s “Syntagma,” cap. ii. p. 13 et seq. What, for instance, can be more ridiculous than the following remark on this subject by the learned Dr. Isaac Barrow? “No one,” says he, “can pretend to assert, as a certainty, that the age of Methusalem [Methuselah!] himself, who lived _a thousand years wanting one_, [999 instead of 969!] was really longer than that of a man, who now dies at _a hundred_! _Why might not the Sun, being then younger and more vigorous, have performed his periods ten times sooner than at this time?_” See his “Geometrical Lectures,” translated by Stone, 1735. _Credat Judæus!_ Dr. Russell states that Augustine was not aware that 400 years had elapsed from the time when the Septuagint version was made, before any discrepancy between the Greek and the Hebrew Scriptures was ever imagined to exist; and that there flourished in that interval, the chronographers Demetrius, Philo, Euphorus, Eupolemus, and Polyhistor, in whose writings, compiled from the books of Moses, we find the events, numbers, dates and proper names, agreeing with the Septuagint, but differing from the modern Hebrew. The ignorance of this early Father in reference to these writers, though it were admitted, for which however we see no good reason, and his want of reference to the works of Josephus, form no ground of objection whatever to the facts of the case; nor can we conclude from his silence regarding their testimony that he was not biassed in favour of the Jewish system of chronology in consequence of the high authority of Jerome in the Christian Church. Dr. Russell gives a very full and clear account of the manner in which this system originated. He states that the publication of the _Seder Olam Rabba_ in A.D. 130, may with certainty be regarded as the epoch at which the Jews altered their genealogies and changed the dates of the great events which are recorded in their Sacred Books; and that Theophilus, bishop of Antioch, was the first Christian chronologer who attempted to compute the age of the world from the facts and dates only which are contained in the Bible. He judiciously remarks that the bishop must have possessed a copy of the Hebrew Scriptures or at least of the Pentateuch, which had escaped the innovations of the Jews; for his dates of the deluge and the birth of Abraham differ from both the Hebrew and the Septuagint.[59] Moreover, we find that Eusebius, in the middle of the fourth century, who was well aware of the discrepancies between the Hebrew and the Septuagint in the matter of chronology, still writes as follows: “On all sides therefore the version of the _Seventy_, being