Page:God and His Book.djvu/15

Rh Tobit and Judith, Wisdom, Ecclesiasticus, Baruch, the Epistle of Jeremiah, the Song of the Three Children, Susanna, Bel and the Dragon, and the Maccabees. The Roman Catholic Church believes all these books to be from the pen of the Ghost; but the Protestant Church alleges that they are the worthless writings of Smith. If the Ghost really wrote them, I should like to hear his opinion of the Protestant Church. If he did not write them, it would be interesting to have his verdict upon the Church of Rome.

The books I have enumerated were canonical down till about 360 years ago. Then a Council of Protestant divines determined that they were not in the handwriting of the Ghost. The heavy majority of Christians, however, still believe that they are the work of that "comforter" and author. Nobody seems to have questioned that the truly insane parts of the Scriptures are by the "comforter;" but learned divines have never been able to quite determine that he wrote Chronicles, Esther, Job, Isaiah, Daniel, Jonah, and Zechariah. I repeat that it is unfortunate that the Ghost writes so perplexingly like Smith. Why did he not adopt a style of his own? He seems to have no idiosyncrasy. Literary talent does not run in the family of El Shaddai. The Father himself, amid a great deal of thunder and lightning at Sinai, wrote a very trite and stupid decalogue, the egotistical burden of which was that they should have no other God except himself. A very poor affair after so much thunder and lightning! Then Jerome informs us that the Son could not write at all, nor read either, I should say, from his star-gazing enthusiasm and uncultured hallucinations. Then, as to the third "person," the Ghost, he has written with so little force and character that there are literally scores of books over which the learned have wrangled for ages, unable to determine whether they were written by the literary member of the Trinity, or by some twopence-halfpenny hack of some ancient Grub Street.

We are to "search the Scriptures" in order to obtain "eternal life;" and some of us, who would really like "eternal life," would not mind the trouble of searching the Scriptures if we could only find out what the