of Gad that you could not look me in the face and say you did not write. I think Ruth is all by thee; it is quite in thy style. O Ancient of Days, am I right? I deem thy son's letter to Abgarus quite genuine, more especially since thy son could not write. I recognise in the speech of Job's wife flashes from the pen of the Most High. Numbers is written by you, especially the thirty-first chapter. Several of the Psalms, too, are thine, especially the psalm of curses.[1] A good deal of Genesis is thine, especially the two accounts of the Creation, which flatly contradict each other, and which are, nevertheless, both true. This sort of writing undoubtedly takes a God to write it and a devil to understand it; and for this and all thy other mercies, make us truly thankful. These, O Shaddai, I mention from the mass of books in which thy Jewish and Christian followers have supposed thee to have had a finger. But there are a great many of the books in regard to which, O Lord, I humbly confess before thee, I cannot for my life determine where Smith ends and Jehovah begins. O Lord, help thou my literary discrimination, or else strengthen my faith ad libitum. I should like wings and glory, and should be sorry to miss them through not knowing whether to attribute the Book of Susanna and the Book of Og to Smith or to thee, O Mighty One of Israel.
It is with due deference that I suggest to the Lord that, when he again writes a book upon which the salvation or perdition of untold millions of mankind is destined to hang, he should take some reasonable care that that book be not lost or destroyed. He has not been at all careful with the Bible; he has more than once permitted it to disappear altogether and to be reproduced by worms of the dust, just in whatever way might please their fancy. First, when God produced his book he gave it in keeping to the Jews. "Unto them were committed the oracles of God."[2] They were not to read it (he seems never to have intended his book should be read), but to place it in the ark, a shittim-wood box of holy nick-nacks, in which he took great interest, coming down now and again to dance upon the lid, or, rather, to shine as a
