_To_ "_eliminate_."--The meaning of this word, according both to its
etymology and its usage in the Latin authors, is quite clear; it is to
"turn out of doors." Figuratively, it has been used by mathematicians to
denote the process by which all incidental matters are gradually thrown
out of an equation to be solved, &c., so that only its essential
conditions at last remain. Of late, however, I have observed it used not
of the _act_ of elimination, but of the _result_; a sense quite foreign
to its true meaning, and producing great ambiguity. Thus, in a recent
Discourse, the object of biblical exegesis is declared to be "the
_elimination_ of the statements of the Bible respecting doctrine;" the
author evidently meaning, not what his words imply,--to get rid of the
statements of the Bible,--though that has been sometimes the problem of
exegesis, but to present the doctrinal result in a clear form, and
detached from everything else.