uses of that are all of them bad or questionable English; because, the ellipsis being such as may be supplied in two or three different ways, the true construction is doubtful, the true meaning not exactly determined by the words.  It is quite as easy and natural to take “that” to be here a demonstrative term, having the relative which understood after it, as to suppose it “a relative,” with an antecedent to be supplied before it.  Since there would not be the same uncertainty, if what were in these cases substituted for that, it is evident that the terms are not “exactly synonymous;” but, even if they were so, exact synonymy would not evince a sameness of construction.

[193] See this erroneous doctrine in Kirkham’s Grammar, p. 112; in Wells’s, p. 74; in Sanborn’s, p. 71, p. 96, and p. 177; in Cooper’s, p. 38; in O. B. Peirce’s, p. 70.  These writers show a great fondness for this complex mode of parsing.  But, in fact, no pronoun, not even the word what, has any double construction of cases from a real or absolute necessity; but merely because, the noun being suppressed, yet having a representative, we choose rather to understand and parse its representative doubly, than to supply the ellipsis.  No pronoun includes “both the antecedent and the relative,” by virtue of its own composition, or of its own derivation, as a word.  No pronoun can properly be called “compound” merely because it has a double construction, and is equivalent to two other words.  These positions, if true, as I am sure they are, will refute sundry assertions that are contained in the above-named grammars.

[194] Here the demonstrative word that, as well as the phrase that matter, which I form to explain its construction, unquestionably refers back to Judas’s confession, that he had sinned; but still, as the word has not the connecting power of a relative pronoun, its true character is that of an adjective, and not that of a pronoun.  This pronominal adjective is very often mixed with some such ellipsis, and that to repeat the import of various kinds of words and phrases:  as, “God shall help her, and that right early.”—­Psal., xlvi, 5.  “Nay, ye do wrong, and defraud, and that your brethren.”—­l Cor., vi, 8.  “I’ll know your business, that I will.”—­Shakespeare.

[195] Dr. Bullions has undertaken to prove, “That the word AS should not be considered a relative in any circumstances.”  The force of his five great arguments to this end, the reader may well conceive of, when he has compared the following one with what is shown in the 22d and 23d observations above:  “3.  As can never be used as a substitute for another relative pronoun, nor another relative pronoun as a substitute for it.  If, then, it is a relative pronoun, it is, to say the least, a very unaccommodating one.”—­Bullions’s Analytical and Practical Gram. of 1849, p. 233.