namely, ἀσωτία on one side, and ἀνελευθερία, οι stinginess,' on the other. And it is in this view of dowría that Plato (Pol. viii. 560 e), when he names the various catachrestic terms, according to which men call their vices by the names of the virtues which they caricature, makes them style. their ἀσωτία, μεγαλοπρέπεια. It is with the word at this stage of its meaning that Plutarch joins TOλUTÉλeia (De Apotheg. Cat. 1).

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But it is easy to see, and Aristotle does not fail to note, that one who is aσwTos in this sense of spending too much, of laying out his expenditure on a more magnificent scheme than his means will warrant, slides too easily under the fatal influence of flatterers, and of all those temptations with which he has surrounded himself, into a spending on his own lusts and appetites of that with which he parts so easily, laying it out for the gratification of his own sensual desires; and that thus a new thought finds its way into the word, so that it indicates not only one of a too expensive, but also and chiefly, of a dissolute, debauched, profligate manner of living; the German lüderlich.' These are his words (Ethic. Nic. iv. 1. 36: Siò κaì åкóλαστοι αὐτῶν [τῶν ἀσώτων] εἰσιν οἱ πολλοί· εὐ χερῶς γὰρ ἀναλίσκοντες καὶ εἰς τὰς ἀκολασίας δαπανηροί εἰσι, καὶ διὰ τὸ μὴ πρὸς τὸ καλὸν ζῆν, πρὸς τὰς ἡδονὰς ἀποκλίνουσιν. Here he gives the explanation of what he has stated before: Tous ἀκρατεῖς καὶ εἰς ἀκολασίαν δαπανηροὺς ἀσώτους καλοῦμεν.

1 Quintilian (Inst. viii. 36): 'Pro luxuriâ liberalitas dicitur.'

In this sense dowría is used in the N. T.; as we find ἀσωτίαι and κραιπάλαι (Herodian, ii. 5) joined elsewhere together. It will of course at once be felt that the two meanings will often run into one another, and that it will be hardly possible to keep them strictly asunder. Thus see the various examples of the ἄσωτος, and of ἀσωτία, which Athenæus (iv. 59-67) gives; they are sometimes rather of one kind, sometimes of the other. The waster of his goods will be very often a waster of everything besides, will lay waste himself-his time, his faculties, his powers; and, we may add, uniting the active and passive meanings of the word, will be himself laid waste; he loses himself, and is lost.

There is a difference in ἀσέλγεια, a word the derivation of which is wrapped in much obscurity; some going so far to look for it as to Selge, a city of Pisidia, whose inhabitants were infamous for their vices; while others derive it from Oéxyelv, probably the same word as the German 'schwelgen.' Of more frequent use than dowria in the New Testament, it is in our Version generally rendered lasciviousness' (Mark vii. 22; 2 Cor. xii. 21; Gal. v. 19; Eph. iv. 19; 1 Pet. iv. 3; Jude 4); though sometimes 'wantonness' (Rom. xiii. 13; 2 Pet. ii. 18); as in the Vulgate either by impudicitia' or 'luxuria.' If our translators or the Latin intended by these renderings to express exclusively impurities and lusts of the flesh, they have certainly given to the word too narrow a meaning. Acéλyea, which it will be observed

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is not grouped with fleshly lusts, in the catalogue of sins at Mark vii. 21, 22, is best described as 'petulance,' or wanton insolence; being somewhat stronger than the Latin 'protervitas,' though of the same nature, more nearly petulantia.' The doeλyns, as Passow observes, is very closely allied to the ὑβριστικός and ἀκόλαστος, being one who acknowledges no restraints, who dares whatsoever his caprice and wanton insolence suggest.' None, of course, would deny that doéλyeta may display itself in acts of what we call lasciviousness;' for there are no worse displays of "ßpus than in these; but still it is their petulance, their insolence, which causes them to deserve this name; and of the two renderings of the word which we have made, 'wantonness' seems to me the preferable, standing as it does, by the double meaning which it has, in a remarkable ethical connexion with the word which we now are considering.

In a multitude of passages the notion of lasciviousness is altogether absent from the word. Thus Demosthenes characterizes the blow which Meidias had given him, as in keeping with the known ȧoélyeia of the man (Con. Meid. 514). Elsewhere he joins δεσποτικῶς and ἀσελγῶς (Or. xvii. 21), ἀσελγῶς and προπετώς (Or. lix. 46). Aς ἀσέλγεια Plutarch characterizes a like outrage on the part of Alcibiades, committed against an honorable

1 Thus Witsius (Melet. Leid. p. 465) observes: ́àσéλyeiav dici posse omnem tam ingenii, quam morum proterviam, petulantiam, lasciviam, quæ ab Eschine opponitur Tŷ μetpiótηti καὶ σωφροσύνῃ.

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citizen of Athens (Alcib. 8); indeed, the whole picture which he draws of Alcibiades is the fulllength portrait of an doeλyns. Josephus ascribes ἀσελγής. ȧoéλyeia and pavía to Jezebel, daring, as she did, to build a temple of Baal in the Holy City itself (Antt. viii. 13. 1); and the same to a Roman soldier, who, being on guard at the Temple during the Passover, provoked by an act of grossest indecency a tumult, in which great multitudes of lives were lost (Ib. xx. 5. 3). And for other passages, helpful to a fixing of the true meaning of ȧoéλyela, see 3 Macc. ii. 26; Polybius, viii. 14. 1 ; Eusebius, Hist. Eccl. v. 1. 26; and the quotations given in Wetstein's New Testament, vol. i. p. It, then, and dowría are clearly distinguishable; the fundamental notion of dowría being wastefulness and riotous excess; of doényeia, lawless insolence and wanton caprice.

§ xvii.—θιγγάνω, ἅπτομαι, ψηλαφάω.

588.

WE are sometimes enabled, by the help of an accurate synonymous distinction, at once to reject as untenable some interpretation of a passage of Scripture, which might, but for this, have maintained itself as at least a possible explanation of it. Thus is it with Heb. xii. 18: "For ye are not come unto the mount that might be touched” (ψηλαφωμένῳ ὄρει). Many interpreters have seen allusion in these words to Ps. civ. 32: "He toucheth the hills, and they smoke;" and to the

fact that, at the giving of the Law, God did descend upon mount Sinai, which "was altogether on a smoke, because the Lord descended upon it" (Exod. xix. 18). But, not to say that in such case we should expect a perfect, as in the following Kekavμév, still more decisively against this is the fact that napáw is never used in the sense of so handling an object as to exercise a moulding, modifying influence upon it, but at most to indicate a feeling of its surface (Luke xxiv. 39; 1 John i. 1); often such a feeling as is made with the intention of learning its composition (Gen. xxvii. 12, 21, 22); while not seldom the word signifies no more than a feeling for or after an object, without any actual coming in contact with it at all. It is used continually to express a groping in the dark (Job v. 14); or of the blind (Isa. lix. 10; Gen. xxvii. 12; Deut. xxviii. 29; Judg. xvi. 26); and tropically, Acts xvii. 27; with which we may compare Plato Phad. 996): ψηλαφώντες ὥσπερ ἐν σKÓTEL and Philo, Quis Rer. Div. Hær. 51. The ψηλαφώμενον ὄρος, in that great passage of the Hebrews, is beyond a doubt the 'mons palpabilis ;' and the Vulgate, which has 'tractabilis,' means nothing else: "Ye are not come," the Apostle would say, "to any material mountain, like Sinai, capable, as such, of being touched and handled; not, in this sense, to the mountain that may be felt, but to the heavenly Jerusalem." It was, he would teach them, a νοητὸν ὄρος, and not an αἰσθητόν, to which they were come.

The so handling of any object as to exert a