Both Roman Catholics and Protestants have fallen into very strange errors in reference to the words of Christ: "Whose soever sins ye remit, they are remitted unto them; _and_ whose soever _sins_ ye retain, they are retained." (St. John xx. 23.) The first have seen in this text the inalienable attributes of God of forgiving and retaining sins transferred to sinful men; the second have most unwisely granted their position, even while attempting to refute their errors. A little more attention to the translation of the 3rd and 6th verses of chapter xiii. of Leviticus by the Septuagint would have prevented the former from falling into their sacrilegious errors, and would have saved the latter from wasting so much time in refuting errors which refute themselves. Every one knows that the Septuagint Bible was the Bible that was generally read and used by Jesus Christ and the Hebrew people, in our Saviour's days. Its language was evidently the one spoken by Christ and understood by his hearers. When addressing his apostles and disciples on their duties towards the spiritual lepers to whom they were to preach the ways of salvation, Christ constantly followed the very expression of the Septuagint. It was the foundation of his doctrine and the testimonial of his divine mission to which he constantly appealed: the book which was the greatest treasure of the nation. From the beginning to the end of the Old and the New Testament, the bodily leprosy, with which the Jewish priest had to deal, is presented as the figure of the spiritual leprosy, sin, the penalty of which our Saviour had taken upon himself, that we might be saved by his death. That spiritual leprosy was the very thing for the cleansing of which he had come to this world--for which he lived, suffered and died. Yes! the bodily leprosy with which the priests of the Jews had to deal, was the figure of the sins which Christ was to take away by shedding his blood, and with which his apostles were to deal till the end of the world. When speaking of the duties of the Hebrew priests towards the leper, our modern translations say: (Lev. xiii. v. 6.) "They will pronounce him clean" or (v. 3d.) "They will pronounce him unclean." But this action of the priests was expressed in a very different way by the Septuagint Bible, used by Christ and the people of his time. Instead of saying, "The priest shall pronounce the leper clean," as we read in our Bible, the Septuagint version says, "The priest shall clean (_katharei_,) or shall unclean (_mianei_,) the leper.