Page:God and His Book.djvu/49

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GOD AND HIS BOOK.
39

to that locality. He does not go to glorious Greece, with her learning and renown—to the "land of lost gods and god-like men;" he does not go to Rome, where, over the forum, the eloquent air "breathed, burned, of Cicero," and whence the Roman tongue and the Roman sword could have carried a knowledge of his writings to every realm over which the Roman Eagles flew. No, the Ghost recognised that he would have no chance in India, with her learning and civilisation stretching far out into the measureless night of antiquity; no chance in studious Egypt, with her hieroglyphics and esoterics and mystery; no chance on the banks of the Ilyssus, where Genius had touched the marble into rapture, and the thought of Plato had climbed on its ladder of stars to the immortal gods; no chance by the Tiber, whose temples were sublime with the scholar's lore, whose breezes were aflame with the poet's song, and where the cohorts of the legion crashed and thundered down the stately street. None of these were adapted to the requirements of the Ghost and his bookwriting. He was God; but, by the Ganges, the Nile, the Ægean Gulf, and the Tiber, there were Men wiser and nobler than he. So he took to a wretched out-of-the-way burn called the Jordan, to a riddlings-of-creation little patch of ground, of the very existence of which hardly anybody had heard. And, instead of availing himself of the Titanic mind-force of a Plato or the volcanic passion-burst of a Sappho, he set himself down in an unheard-of Galilee village, and commenced to operate upon bumpkins.

To a layman like myself, who has not been taken into the literary confidence of the Trinity, it is exceedingly difficult to understand what assistance to the Ghost "unlearned and ignorant men" could possibly be. Why did he use them? Were they not an obstruction, rather than a service to him? Could he not have managed to write his two contradictory genealogical tables, for instance, as well without "Matthew" and "Luke" as with them ? Could the Holy Ghost not express his priceless treasures of literature except through the medium of an automatically-scrawling yokel? The father, at Sinai, wrote with his finger; could not the Paraclete, at Jerusalem, have written with his toe? This would have allowed maunder-