fully aware how the various criticisms on the words in which that first
promise of a Saviour is couched, have been the well-spring of angry
controversy. I will not enter upon that field. The authorized English
version thus renders the passage: "I will put enmity between thee and
the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head,
and thou shalt bruise his heel." [Gen. iii. 15.] The Roman Vulgate,
instead of the word "it," reads "she." Surely such a point as this
should be made a subject of calm and enlightened criticism, without
warmth or heart-burnings on either side. But for our present purpose, it
matters little what turn that controversy may take. I believe our own to
be the true rendering: but whether the word dictated here by the Holy
Spirit to Moses should be so translated as to refer to the seed of the
woman generally, as in our authorized version, or to the male child, the
descendant of the woman, as the Septuagint renders it, or to the word
"woman" itself; and if the latter, whether it refer to Eve, the mother
of every child of a mortal parent, or to Mary, the immediate mother of
our Saviour: whatever view of that Hebrew word be taken, no Christian
can doubt, that before the foundations of the world were laid, it was
foreordained in the counsels of the Eternal Godhead, that the future
Messiah, the Redeemer of Mankind, should be of the seed of Eve, and in
the fulness of time be born of a Virgin of the name of Mary, and that in
the mystery of that incarnation should the serpent's head be bruised. I
wish not to dwell on this, because it bears but remotely and
incidentally on the question at issue. I will, therefore, pass on,
quoting {273} only the words of one of the most laborious among Roman
Catholic commentators, De Sacy. "The sense is the same in the one and in
the other, though the expression varies. The sense of the Hebrew is, The
Son of the Woman, Jesus Christ, Son of God, and Son of a Virgin, shall
bruise thy head, and by establishing the kingdom of God on earth,
destroy thine. The sense of the Vulgate is, The woman, by whom thou hast