The translators have rendered these passages: "The harvest is the end of the world." "Demas hath forsaken me, having loved this present world." In these cases, it will be seen that they have rightly excluded the idea of unendingness from the word [Greek: aion]. But why? we ask. If it was right to include it in Mark iii. 29, it was wrong to exclude it in the two last-named passages. Then why exclude it? The answer is, that it would have been too utterly foolish to translate Matthew xiii. 39, as "The harvest is the end of the forever," and 2 Tim. iv. 10, as "Demas hath forsaken me, having loved the present eternity"--and so the translators in these instances gave the word its true signification. But can it, we ask, be right to treat language in this way--to make a word mean one thing to serve the purposes of a doctrinal idea, and to make it mean something essentially opposite, when that idea is not involved? Does anyone imagine that the translators would have introduced this contradiction, and have translated the Greek of Mark xiii. 29, as they have done, unless they had gone to this text with the preconceived idea that a certain sin can never be forgiven, and therefore that the passage must be strained and contorted to endorse the idea? It is an instance, not of founding theology upon Scripture, but of twisting Scripture to suit theology. One thing is quite certain. It cannot be right to translate a word in some passages in one sense, and to translate it in other passages in an antagonistic sense. The word [Greek: aion] cannot denote a period of limitation, and also unendingness. If it denotes the one it does not denote the other. The one definition excludes the other. No one, in his senses, dreams of defining a day as a period of twelve hours under one set of circumstances, and also as being the equivalent of all time under other circumstances. We have to determine what is the true definition of [Greek: aion]. If it can be shown that the essential meaning of the word is that of limited duration, then the case is very clear; the translators were not justified in foisting into it the idea of unendingness; and this being so, a huge superstructure of doctrine, reared upon the mistranslation, will totter and fall, and an awful nightmare will be lifted from the Christian religion. An adjective qualifies its noun, and we cannot import into the adjective more than is contained in the noun. We may speak of the race of mankind as "humanity," and describe the existence of the race as "human life," but we should not be so absurd as to define "human" in that phrase as signifying "Divine." And yet the translators have been guilty of committing a similar error in translating the word [Greek: aion] in the passages instanced as "world," which is equivalent to an age, and expresses limitation; while translating [Greek: aionios] as "everlasting" and "eternal;" both of which terms exclude limitation.