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22 was that they should have a good running hand, only a very few brains, some inventive faculty, and that they should be liars. They did the whole thing in forty days. If they had taken an extra ten days, they might have made a better job of it; but God seems satisfied, and why should not I?

One indispensable in Bible-writing is ambiguity; and, in the vague, equivocal, and obscure, Ezra was a perfect master. In writing a human book it is necessary to make it convey some specific meaning; but, in writing a divine book, care has to be taken to give it no meaning in particular: make it mean anything or nothing, and always leave a loophole through which the apologist can slip out and explain away whatever may oppose the particular position for which he contends. If you are writing a Bible and find yourself degenerating into anything like explicable common sense, it is incumbent on you to mix your sentence up with candlesticks and wheat, and beasts and chariots, and horns, and souls of men, and trumpets and millstones, and dragons and stars, and phials and earthquakes, till no sane person would write such a passage and no sane person would read it; then it will have all the better chance to pass unchallenged as "the word of God." A God or an oracle should never utter anything that has not, at least, two meanings.

Gods and oracles have usually observed this rule. Bible readers do not require to be directed to any particular instance of Jehovah's divine ambiguity, and classical readers will readily remember the cleverly equivocal utterances of the Delphic Oracle. Pyrrhus desired to know what would be the result of his projected expedition against Rome. The Oracle replied:—

The same Oracle replied to Crœsus, King of Lydia:—