CHAPTER XIX.
Acquaintance with God's Book—The Assault not upon the Bible's Own Pretensions, but upon the Pretensions Made for it—Two "Creations," the First by the Gods, the Second by the Lord—Reconcilement of the Two Conflicting Accounts—Woman Made in the Dark—The Damnation-Trap in Eden—The Question.
I am no bigot for or against his Book, being neither Protestant nor Papist; and I simply wish to give the Ghost fair play as an author. I have said little about the merits of his work; but that is not because they, such as they are, have escaped my recognition. From my earliest boyhood I have been steeped in the writings of the Ghost. As a child, I had heard of the Waters of Babel in Babylonia before I had heard of the Water of Dee in my own Galloway. For long, Jordan was a more familiar word than Clyde; and I knew of Carmel and Olivet years before I had heard of Cairngorm and Ben Nevis. I could tell all about Adoption, Sanctification, and Redemption before I knew the genitive from the dative, before I had heard of the Equator or could tell how many roods there were in an acre. I was suckled upon "the milk of the word;" I was dandled on the knee of the Virgin Mary; and the linen that enshrouded the corpse of Jesus was my swaddling clothes. Before I had as yet learnt to read I could recite from memory some dozens of the "psalms of David." In my native moorlands the echo of the voices of the Covenanters had hardly as yet died away. Tradition fondly nursed the martyrs' memory; I beheld their graves in the grey cairns, and the burn wimpling over the pebbles murmured their dirge. The plaided shepherd on the hill-side spake of them, and so did the miry-footed ploughman on the furrowed field.
