the Prior-perfect, the Prior-present, the Perfect, the Pluperfect, the Preterperfect, the Preperfect.[302]
In teaching others to speak and write well, it becomes us to express our doctrines in the most suitable terms; but the application of a name is of no great consequence, so that the thing itself be rightly understood by the learner. Grammar should be taught in a style at once neat and plain, clear and brief. Upon the choice of his terms, the writer of this work has bestowed much reflection; yet he finds it impossible either to please everybody, or to explain, without intolerable prolixity, all the reasons for preference.
OBS. 3.--The participle in ing represents the action or state as continuing and ever incomplete; it is therefore rightly termed the IMPERFECT participle: whereas the participle in ed always, or at least usually, has reference to the action as done and complete; and is, by proper contradistinction, called the PERFECT participle. It is hardly necessary to add, that the terms perfect and imperfect, as thus applied to the English participles, have no reference to time, or to those tenses of the verb which are usually (but not very accurately) named by these epithets. The terms present and past, which some still prefer to imperfect and perfect, do denote time, and are in a kind of oblique contradistinction; but how well they apply to the participles, may be seen by the following texts: "God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself."--"We pray you in Christ's stead, be ye reconciled to God."--ST. PAUL: 2 Cor., v, 19, 20. Here reconciling refers to the death of Christ, and reconciled, to the desired conversion of the Corinthians; and if we call the former a present participle, and the latter a past, (as do Bullions, Burn, Clark, Felton, S. S. Greene,
