translating the Bible: few really read it, even after it has been translated. If you find a man here and there who has really read the Bible, he is always more or less of an "Infidel." The true Christian dees not read it; he only praises it. He gives it a conspicuous place in his house—in some parts of England I have seen it, large and gilt, do duty as an ornament for the window-sill; it is in his hand every Sunday at least, and I know one or two saints who carry it constantly in their pockets; and yet they know nothing of where it came from, and next to nothing of what is in it.
"One day a flash of lightning struck a mortal;
The ghost he didn't yield —
Above his heart and in his bosom pocket
A Bible was his shield.
"A marvellous deliverance, and worthy
Of any poet's rhyme;
But just suppose that mortal had been reading
His Bible at the time!"
However, the lightning did not find him reading it, and it will require to take three or four more shies at him before it does find him reading it.
If anything at all be certain in regard to such a doubtful quantity as the Old Testament, it is certain that it is the production of Ezra. Besides the evidence on this point I have already quoted, that Ezra reproduced the lost Bible was the uniform opinion of the early Christian Church. Clement of Alexandria writes: "In the captivity by Nebuchodonosor, the writings having been destroyed, in the time of Artaxerxes, King of the Persians, Esdras, the Levite, having become inspired, prophesied, restoring again all the old writings."[1]
Tertullian writes: "Jerusalem having been destroyed by the Babylonian siege, it appears that every instrument of Jewish literature was restored by Esdras."[2]
Eusebius quotes Irenæus as saying: "And it is not at all wonderful that God wrought this, who also in the captivity of the people in the time of Nebuchodonosor, when the writings had been destroyed, and the Jews
