“This volume is like a beautiful old picture which has come down to us in a state of extraordinary perfection.”
Clement Clarke Moore (1779-1863) is best known as author of the poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas” (also known as “’Twas the Night Before Christmas.”[i] Additionally, Moore was Professor of Oriental & Greek Literature and Divinity & Biblical Learning at the General Theological Seminary in New York City – a seminary of the Protestant Episcopal Church (i.e., the Anglican Church in the United States). He compiled A Compendious Lexicon of the Hebrew Language, in Two Volumes (New York, NY: Collins & Perkins, 1809).
On November 14, 1825, Clement C. Moore gave a lecture at Christ Church in New York City. Professor Moore’s lecture was reported in the February 1826 issue of The Christian Journal and Literary Register (Vol. X, No. 2, pages 51-52). The author said Moore’s “description of the Bible is unequalled.”
“Such, my young friends, is the wonderful volume, to the study of which a large portion of the time to be passed by you in the seminary is allotted. When the difficulties of its language are surmounted, it opens an abundant store of treasures to the antiquary, the historian, the chronologer, the philologist, the grammarian, the orator, the poet, and the divine. Its entire freedom from every thing that makes the least approach to affectation; the unrivalled simplicity of its style; its admirable touches of pathos; the perfect picture of nature in its narratives and descriptions; the beautiful metaphors, allegories, and similies; the noble hymns of praise; the profound strains of penitence and prayer with which it abounds, added to its high and holy import, render it a work of a nature fitted, in every point of view, to excite the most intense interest, and to afford the most exquisite gratification. And I hope it is not presumptuous in a layman to dissuade you from being influenced by the practice of those bold critics who, by conjectural emendations of the original text, attempt to throw light upon such parts of it as the lapse of ages has rendered obscure. This volume is like a beautiful old picture which has come down to us in a state of extraordinary perfection. Some defects and blemishes, it is true, appear; but they materially hurt neither the design nor the colouring; and it is not for modern and obtrusive hands to attempt to repair the injuries done by time to such a venerable and matchless work.”
Moore’s discourse was printed by T. and J. Swords of New York in a booklet as A Lecture Introductory to the Course of Hebrew Instruction in the General Theological Seminary of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States.
[i] The poem was first published anonymously in the Troy, New York Sentinel on December 23, 1823. Moore later claimed authorship.
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