1. Lady Carbery one day told me that she could not see any reasonable ground for what is said of Christ, and elsewhere of John the Baptist, that he opened his mission by preaching "repentance." Why "repentance"? Why then, more than at any other time? Her reason for addressing this remark to me was, that she fancied there might be some error in the translation of the Greek expression. I replied that, in my opinion, there was; and that I had myself always been irritated by the entire irrelevance of the English word, and by something very like cant, on which the whole burden of the passage is thrown. How was it any natural preparation for a vast spiritual revolution, that men should first of all acknowledge any special duty of repentance? The repentance, if any movement of that nature could intelligibly be supposed called for, should more naturally _follow_ this great revolution--which, as yet, both in its principle and in its purpose, was altogether mysterious--than herald it, or ground it. In my opinion, the Greek word _metanoia_ concealed a most profound meaning--a meaning of prodigious compass--which bore no allusion to any ideas whatever of repentance. The _meta_ carried with it an emphatic expression of its original idea--the idea of transfer, of translation, of transformation; or, if we prefer a Grecian to a Roman apparelling, the idea of a _metamorphosis_. And this idea, to what is it applied? Upon what object is this idea of spiritual transfiguration made to bear? Simply upon the _noetic_ or intellectual faculty--the faculty of shaping and conceiving things under their true relations. The holy herald of Christ, and Christ himself the finisher of prophecy, made proclamation alike of the same mysterious summons, as a baptism or rite of initiation; namely, _Metanoei_. Henceforth transfigure your theory of moral truth; the old theory is laid aside as infinitely insufficient; a new and spiritual revelation is established. _Metanoeite_--contemplate moral truth as radiating from a new centre; apprehend it under transfigured relations.