A BIT OF HUMOR

The great OT scholar Joseph Alexander, who taught at Princeton some 15 years before our American Civil War, wrote some 500 pages in his Hebrew commentary on the book of Isaiah. Now imagine: this book was penned those many years before the Civil War!    Dr. Alexander had a bunch of mistakes in his first printing of the book. We often think that such old scholars wrote impeccably and would not have made any literary booboos! But this is not so. Thus, Dr. Alexander had to make a correction, with humor, and he wrote:    "Since the printing of the volume was completed, the typographical errors have been found to be more numerous than was expected, although for the most part less injurious to the work than discreditable to the author. Instead of resorting to the usual apologies of distance from the press, and inexperience in the business, or appealing to the fact that the sheets could be subjected only once to his revision, he prefers to throw himself upon the candor and indulgence of his readers, and especially of those who have experienced the same mortification!"    Now that takes guts! And a lot of humor in the spirit! – Dr. Mal Couch (Jan,. 10)