HKB
the Apostles, John and Paul, without finding in almost every page a confirmation of this, must have looked at them, as at the sun in an eclipse, through blackened glasses.
[129] Job. iv. 18.--ED.
[130] St. Paul blends both forms of expression, and asserts the same doctrine when speaking of the celestial body provided for the new man in the spiritual flesh and blood, (that is, the informing power and vivific life of the incarnate Word: for the Blood is the Life, and the Flesh the Power)--when speaking, I say, of this celestial body, as a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens, yet brought down to us, made appropriable by faith, and ours--he adds, for in this earthly house (that is, this mortal life, as the inward principle or energy of our Tabernacle, or outward and sensible body) we groan, earnestly desiring to be clothed upon with our house which is from heaven: not that we would be unclothed, but clothed upon, that mortality might be swallowed up of life. 2 Cor. v. 1-4.
The four last words of the first verse (eternal in the heavens) compared with the conclusion of v. 2, (which is from heaven) present a coincidence with John iii. 13, "And no man hath ascended up to heaven, but he that came down from heaven, even the Son of Man, which is in heaven." [Would not the coincidence be more apparent, if the words of John had been rendered word for word, even to a disregard of the English idiom, and with what would be servile and superstitious fidelity in the translation of a common classic? I can see no reason why the ουδεις, so frequent in St. John, should not be rendered literally, no one; and there may be a reason why it should. I have some doubt likewise respecting the omission of the definite articles τον, του, τω--and a greater, as to the ὁ ων, both in this place and in John i. 18, being adequately rendered by our which is. What sense some of the Greek Fathers attached to, or inferred from, St. Paul's in the Heavens, the theological student (and to theologians is this note principally addressed) may find in Waterland's Letters to a Country Clergyman--a divine, whose judgment and strong sound sense are as unquestionable as his learning and orthodoxy. A clergyman in full orders, who has never read the works of Bull and Waterland, has a duty yet to perform.]