Page:God and His Book.djvu/75



A Hiatus of over 2,000 Years—No Allowance Made for Change in the Language from the Date of Genesis to that of Malachi—The Septuagint and its Witnesses — Prodigies which would be Incredible but for the Evidence of such Witnesses.

modern men write they so fix and dispose their words that the words suggest the meaning. It was different, as I have pointed out, with the ancient Holy Ghost. He expected the reader to fix upon a meaning, and then make the words accommodate themselves to the meaning he desired them to convey. To give one simple example,, sh; , m; , r (read from right to left), might be shemar, he kept; shemor, keep thou; or shomer, keeping. The writings of the Holy Ghost, as I have insisted upon, are not particular as to trifles of that kind: "You pays your money and you takes your choice."

The Holy Ghost permitted his book to remain in this free-and-easy, anything-you-like condition for some twenty centuries, and it was not till between the sixth and twelfth centuries after Christ that he began to be a little more particular, and to raise the standard of examination for admission into the kingdom of heaven. By the tenth century he had completed the Masora, thereby making the meaning of his book more definite than it had ever been previously, although, even to this day, it is immeasurably the most indefinite book we have among us. First we have to purchase it, which incurs only a trifling expense; but, next, we have to hire a holy man of God to explain it, and build him a huge house with a steeple in which to explain it; for no ordinary kind of house is good enough to praise the Lord in for all "his tender mercies," including poverty, disease, war, and