others, who are quite lost, were metamorphosed into prayer-books and homilies."[1]
However gratifying this may be to an illiterate saint, it is a fact replete with humiliation, regret, and pain to every scholar and votary of polite learning. None except the most brainless of the elect can rejoice that, instead of the lost books of Livy, we have a foolish prayer to some stupid saint and a platitudinarian homily by some canonised blackguard. To none except the most fanatical followers of the Lamb can it be anything else than a subject for regret that, instead of the works of Polybius, we have an account of the miracles that were worked by the many heads of John the Baptist that were possessed by different abbeys. To all except the truly devout it must be a shameful admission that, in place of the writings of Uio and Diodorus Siculus, we have accounts of the different bottles of the Virgin Mary's milk, of the casket that contained her chemise, of that inestimable relic a finger of the Holy Ghost, of Christ's tooth which was preserved in the monastery of St. Medard, and the navel string of his birth, and even the prepuce of his circumcision, which were duly preserved and venerated. It does not tend to reconcile the scholar to the Galilean, this horrid Christian babblement about prayers and homilies and heads and milk and chemises and teeth and navel-strings and prepuces, instead of Livy and Diodorus Siculus, and other irretrievably-lost treasures of the classics of poetic Greece and conquering Rome.
I accuse the " Holy Scriptures," not only of a perversion and waste of good brains, but of wasting the time of those who had no brains, and who might, instead of making the following tables, have been profitably employed in some honest calHng like sweeping the street, feeding hogs, or driving a jack-ass. Here is a specimen of the kind of work they executed instead:—
- ↑ Jortin's "Ecclesiastical History," vol. iii., pp. 324–5, quoting from Montfaucon, " Mem. de l'Acad.," ix., 325.
