3. Others suppose that the prophet narrates events which took place _actually_, indeed, but _not outwardly_. This opinion was, considering the time at which it was advanced, very ably defended by _Jerome_ in _Epist. ad Pammachium_, and in his commentary on chap. i. 8. According to _Rufinus_, all those in Palestine and Egypt who respected the authority of _Origen_, asserted that the marriage took place only in spirit. The difficulties attaching to the first view were made especially obvious by the ridicule of the Manicheans (_Faustus_ and _Secundinus_ in _Augustine_, t. vi. p. 575) on this narrative. The most accomplished Jewish scholars (_Maimonides_ in the _More Nebuch._ p. ii. c. 46, _Abenezra_, _Kimchi_) support this opinion. Some new arguments in defence of it have been adduced by _Marckius_. Of these three views:--actually and outwardly; neither outwardly nor actually; actually, but not outwardly,--the second must be at once rejected. Those who hold it supply, "God has commanded me to tell you." But there is not the slightest intimation of such an ellipsis; and those interpreters have no better right to supply it in this, than in any other narrative. There is before us action, and nothing but action, without any intimation whatsoever that it is merely an invention. But the following arguments are decisive in favour of the third, and against the first view. 1. The defenders of an outward transaction rely, in support of their view, upon the supposition, that their interpretation is most obvious and natural;--that they are thus, as it were, in the _possession_ of the ground, and in a position from which they can be driven only by the most cogent reasons;--that if the transaction had been internal, it would have been necessary for the prophet to have expressly marked it as such. But precisely the reverse of all this is the case. The most obvious supposition [Pg 186] is, that the symbolical action took place in vision. If _certain_ actions of the prophets, especially seeing, hearing, and their speaking to the Lord, etc., must be conceived of as having taken place inwardly, unless there be distinct indications of the opposite, why not the remainder also? For the former presupposes that the world in which the prophets move, is altogether different from the ordinary one; that it is not the outward, but the spiritual world. It is certainly not a matter of chance, that the _seeing_ in the case of the prophets must be understood spiritually; and if there be a reason for this, the same reason entitles us to assert that the walking, etc., also took place inwardly only. By what right could we make any difference between the actions of others, described by the prophet, and his own? Vision and symbolical action are not opposed to each other; the former is only the _genus_ comprehending the latter as a _species_. By this we do not at all mean to assert, that _all_ the symbolical actions of the prophets took place in inward vision only. An