Page:God and His Book.djvu/20



Qualifications of a True Littérateur—List of Books that at Various Times have been Attributed to the Holy Ghost—Which of them are Really His?—Lack of Care in the Custody of the Scriptures—Curious Plan Deity Adopted to Publish the Scriptures.

Christ's nor the sea-gull's writings have found their way into the inspired volume (although, here and there, something alarmingly like them have), so the entire Scriptures are the work of Jehovah and the Ghost, with a little touch up here and there by that "worm of the dust," John Smith.

From the remnants from his pen which he has graciously vouchsafed to us, we cannot claim for Jehovah-jireth commanding talent as a writer. How could he be a writer? The god or man who would write well must know much of the world and much of books. To get a few paces abreast of his fellows, he must have unconquerable self-respect and immaculate purity of moral aim and aspiration. He must have the bone and the sinew to work while others rest, to toil while others sleep, the self-consciousness of talent or even genius based upon an indomitable will, a tireless energy, and a lofty but tender humanity. He may make himself sociable; but he has no time to be frivolous. Now, if these be the characteristics of a writer born to lead the straggling files of human opinion, it must be admitted that Jehovah had few or none of them, unless his biographer, the Ghost, has done him grievous injustice. He is jealous, ignorant, and narrow, and quite lacking in that literary turn of the wrist, unteachable, untaught, which distinguishes him who, by an inexorable law of heredity, was born a writer from him who was made a writer, on the principle that