your flunkeys, O Lord, are stone-blind leaders of the blind. I can get no answers from them, and so I come direct to you. Their business is to make their living by canting about your Book to the unquestioning herd,'and they would rather take a toad by the nose than attempt to answer such questions as I put. I asked one of your servants the other day—a very choice one with a red face and a white tie—if he would be good enough to furnish me with anything approaching valid historical proof that that son of yours ever tramped the country preaching till he ultimately got nailed to two sticks. I expected to hear of evidence from Tacitus, Suetonius, Josephus, et hoc genus. But that servant of yours, with the red face and the white tie, simply laid his hand on his heart, or his stomach (I am not physiologist enough to say exactly which), and, turning up his eyes, the way a duck does in a thunderstorm, observed, "My evidence is here." It was clear to me that the evidence lay somewhere in his intestines. That may be all very well for him. You may have constructed him so that he has evidence of the Crucifixion in his hepatic artery, corroboration of the Atonement in the splenic veins, and proof of the Resurrection in his gastric juice. But you have not constructed me on that accommodating plan, Lord. My internal arrangements have evidently been contrived to digest and assimilate my food. When I ask them about you, they are dumb; when I ask them about your son Jesus, they know nothing about him. When historical proofs have to be examined, I have to use my head, such as it is. I never found my liver of any use in such investigations, and the soles of my feet I have not yet tried. They are not easily got at; but I will have them thoroughly examined if you give me a hint that, on them, I am likely to "find Jesus."
But, to be serious, how is it, O Lord, that you have constructed certain of your creatures on such a plan that they have proof of the Incarnation, the Redemption, etc., somewhere in their inside? How is it that my inside, and that the insides of my readers, are fit only for digestive and circulatory functions, and that they know as much about the weighing of evidence as the calves of my legs do about shooting snipes? I mention this lest
