ing Saul of Tarsus, mad John of Patmos, and the rest of them to have devoted their attention to mundane affairs. Was a man much use for makinq tents or hawking fish after the Holy Ghost had used him as a sort of treadle printing-machine? From my studies in esoteric divinity, I infer that "inspiration" was a sort of cross between a galvanic shock and delirium tremens. Why was a yokel used in preference to, say, a he-goat or a pump? A pen could have been fastened to the goat's horns, and, on "inspiration" being turned on, he could have produced "The Gospel of St. Capricornus;" or the pen could have been fixed to the pump-handle, and, under a good strong current of "inspiration," could have been produced "The Gospel According to Pump." It is clear that the Ghost, when writing, cannot write directly, but requires some sort of medium or other; and, after all, it is rather fortunate he used dolts rather than any other kind of rubbish. I, too, if I were in the Ghost's shoes, and found I must use some worthless thing or other to make my writings legible, should use the ordinary brainless homunculus, rather than run the risk of maiming a respectable he-goat or injuring the village pump by using them for my inspirational experiments.
To know what the Ghost wrote, the unlearned are entirely at the mercy of the learned, and the learned themselves are notorious for their disagreement as to what the Holy Dove really wished to be at when cooing the Bible to mankind. Hebrew, the language in which the Holy Dove cooed, and which was, at best, a language suited only to a dove or a savage, has been dead for about two thousand four hundred years; for we find that, when the Hebrew Scriptures were read out to the people in the days of Nehemiah, those who read had to "give the sense, and cause them to understand the reading."[1] During the captivity the Hebrews had forgotten, or had probably been proscribed the use of, their own language, and, as slaves, they had no doubt picked up the patois of Chaldea.
Just to give the English reader some faint idea of the infinite and tender mercies of Jehovah in sending his
- ↑ Nehemiah viii. 8.
