Those who would write Bibles, or even explain them, would do well to found their style on these two utterances of the Delphic Oracle.
Bible-making is easily enough executed if you, or Ezra, or any one else, only keep up a due blending and admixture of ambiguity and incomprehensibility. Speak to the vulgar in language they understand, and they think you are simply one of themselves. But it is very different when you, or Ezra, or any one else, burst out into, "And they four had one likeness: and their appearance and their work was as it were a wheel in the middle of a wheel. When they went they went upon their four sides; and they turned not when they went. As for their rings, they were so high that they were dreadful; and their rings were full of eyes round about them four. And when the living creatures went the wheels went by them; and when the living creatures were lifted up from the earth, the wheels were lifted up."[1] If you want to gull the multitude out of first their reason and then their coppers, keep firmly on the lines of the mysterious. It is an oft-spoken whim of the cynics—and possibly something more—that the doctors give their prescriptions in Latin so as to afford their ignorant patients the benefit of a little imagination. Bolus Panificum sounds a good deal more important than "bread-pill." Some years ago, in a Rhode Island Legislature, a member moved to translate all the Latin phrases in the statutes, so that the people could understand them. A Mr. Updike took the ground that it was no advantage to have the people understand the laws. He said they were not afraid of anything they understood; that it was the Latin words they were afraid of; and proceeded to illustrate as follows: "Mr. Speaker, there was a man in South Kingston, about twenty years ago, who was a perfect nuisance, and nobody knew how to get rid of him. One day he was hoeing corn, and he saw the sheriff coming with a paper, and asked him what it was. Now, if he had been told it was a writ, what would he have cared? But the sheriff told him it was a capias satisfaciendum, and the man dropped his hoe and ran, and has not been heard of since."
- ↑ Ezekiel i. 16-19.
