On the Tabular (Columnar) Exposition — The Thirteenth Method
The Tabular — that is, the Columnar Method 1 — is a most orderly fitting-together of a compendious, lucid, and most rich exposition, by tables and columns; which sets before the eyes most clearly and most distinctly the sense of the Sacred reading, and, as it were in a mirror, demonstrates the elucidation of the individual words in a most beautiful order and a most fitting series of numbers, and greatly conduces to the ease of apprehension and the stability of memory. For this is implanted in us by nature: that the more distinctly and orderly things are set before the eyes, the more easily, lucidly, and distinctly the intellective faculty apprehends them, and the more tenaciously and longer the memory preserves them. Now the artifice of this kind of fitting-together is arranged 2 chiefly in two tablets, or columns, so digested on the same page that the first tablet, or column, contains the individual words of the Sacred reading — expressed in larger letters, collocated one under another from the head to the heel of the same column in most fitting order, and marked with their numbers; but the second column comprehends the words of the exposition, described in smaller characters, corresponding over against (è regione) the individual words of the Holy reading, so that in each line of Scripture one of the words of the Sacred context, and the exposition of that same word, are discerned at one and the same view — as appears in the subjoined example.
Exposition of Psalm 116
(First column: the words of the Psalm, numbered; second column: the exposition set over against each.)
- PRAISE — with your minds admire, with your tongues declare, with your works express, the works of God.
- THE LORD — God, and especially the Father, of things vi‑
2. THE LORD (cont.) — God, and especially the Father, the creator of all things visible and invisible: celebrate [him]. 3. ALL — as many of you as inhabit the whole globe of the earth, from East to West and from North to South. 4. NATIONS — you who, without circumcision, live piously and holily under the law of nature. 5. PRAISE — extol [him] with psalms, with hymns, and with all the applause of words and of affections. 6. HIM — whose glory all creatures perpetually declare. 7. ALL — twelve tribes of Israel: you, I say, above the other nations, praise him together. 8. PEOPLES — renowned [peoples] of the Hebrews, whom God by a singular privilege chose for himself, out of all the nations of the earth, as a peculiar possession. 9. FOR — for this cause chiefly is God to be praised most highly by us, both Jews and Gentiles: because — 10. IS CONFIRMED — that is, granted, and most fully completed, and in the last times poured out in abundance. 11. OVER US — not only the Jews, but also the Gentiles; not only the just, but also sinners. 12. HIS MERCY — the kindness and grace of human restoration, shown to us in the incarnation of Christ. 13. AND THE TRUTH — of the promises which he had made through the prophets concerning the sending of his Son: that [truth], I say. 14. OF THE LORD — the fidelity of God the Father, etc.