Page:God and His Book.djvu/58

48 depended upon it, and have found "salvation" in it quite easily and with flying colours, he should have contrived to make parchment much cheaper than it was in the days of the copying saints. In his wisdom and omnipotence he might have accomplished this by giving each calf and each sheep, say, four skins, instead of only one. Skin No. I. might have been flayed off, and the gospel of Matthew written upon it. This executed, the sheep could have been brought in from the green pastures and still waters and persuaded with a knife to give skin No. 2, that on it might be transcribed the gospel of Mark; and so on till the fully-transcribed gospels of Luke and John had accomplished our skinny salvation. The ass, too, might have been enticed to give up his pachydermatous envelope to the sacred purpose of gospel-writing. The ass yielding up his hide for such a purpose would have had something peculiarly graceful and appropriate in it.

Jehovah, very likely, sees all this now as clearly as I do, and I will not be so ungracious as to insist upon giving him advice after the event. All I say is that, if he had been graciously pleased to make parchment cheaper, we should have had more copies than we have of his divine and exceedingly correct Word, and several of the scraps and tatters upon which depends "England's greatness" would have been much more legible and could have been deciphered with a probability more closely approaching certainty. Parchment was so dear and scarce that skins upon which gospels had been written by the saints had matter which was certainly not gospel scrawled overlhem by persons who were certainly not saints. To give the reader not versed in textual criticism some idea of what I mean, I subjoin a fac simile of a fragmentary MS. of the sixth century, and which is to be seen in the British Museum: —