18; ("Jehovah shall reign for ever and ever;") where the Greek has [Greek: ton aiona kai ex aiona kai eti], which would mean "for eternity and still longer," if the strict rendering _eternity_ were enforced.

At the same time a suspicion as to the honesty of our translation presented itself in Micah v.

2, a controversial text, often used to prove the past eternity of the Son of God; where the translators give us,--"whose goings forth have been _from everlasting_," though the Hebrew is the same as they elsewhere render _from days of old_.
After I had at leisure searched through this new question, I found that it was impossible to make out any doctrine of a philosophical eternity in the whole Scriptures.

The true Greek word for _eternal_ ([Greek: aidios]) occurs twice only: once in Rom.i.20, as applied to the divine power, and once in Jude 6, of the fire which has been manifested against Sodom and Gomorrha.

The last instance showed that allowance must be made for rhetoric; and that fire is called _eternal_ or _unquenchable_, when it so destroys as to leave nothing unburnt.
But on the whole, the very vocabulary of the Greek and Hebrew denoted that the idea of absolute eternity was unformed.