Says Bishop Jeremy Taylor: “In all the interpretations of Scripture, the literal sense is to be presumed and chosen unless there be evident cause to the contrary.”
Says Prof. J. A. Ernest: “There is in fact but one and the same method of interpretation common to all books whatever be their subject. And the same grammatical principles and precepts, ought to be the common guide in the interpretation of all. Theologians are right, therefore, when they affirm the literal sense, or that which is derived from the knowledge of words, to be the only true one; for that mystical sense, which indeed is incorrectly called a sense, belongs altogether to the thing and not to the words.”
Says the learned Vitringa: “We must never depart from the literal meaning of the subject mentioned in its own appropriate name, if all or its principal attributes square with the subject of the prophecy—an unerring canon, he adds, and of great use.”
Says Martin Luther: “That which I have so often insisted on elsewhere, I here once more repeat, viz: that the christian should direct his first efforts toward understanding the literal sense [as it is called] of Scripture, which alone is the substance of faith and of christian theology. The allegorical sense is commonly uncertain and by no means safe to build our faith upon: for it usually depends on human opinion and conjecture only, on which if a man lean, he will find it no better than the Egyptian reed. Therefore Origen, Jerome, and similar of the fathers are to be avoided with the whole of that Alexandrian school which, according to Eusebius and Jerome, formerly abounded in this species of interpretation. For later writers unhappily following their too much praised and prevailing example, it has come to pass that men make just what they please of the Scriptures, until some accommodate the word of God to the most extravagant absurdities; and, as Jerome complains of his own times, they extract a sense from Scripture repugnant to its meaning: of which offence, however, Jerome himself was also guilty.”
Says Rosenmuller: “All ingenuous and unprejudiced persons will grant me this position, that there is no method of removing difficulties more secure than that of an accurate interpretation derived from the words of the texts themselves, and from their true and legitimate meaning, and depending upon no hypothesis.”
Dr. John Pye Smith defines the literal sense as “The common rule of all rational interpretation, viz: the sense afforded by a cautious and critical examination of the terms of the passage, and an impartial construction of the whole sentence, according to the known usage of the language and the writer.”
Such is the system adopted in this volume, it being regarded as the only safe principle of interpreting the Bible.—Voice of the Church.