Page:Hardy - Jude the Obscure, 1896.djvu/200

 lay near her, and during his retreat she took it up, and turned over the leaves.

"Jude," she said, brightly, when he had finished and come back to her, "will you let me make you a new New Testament, like the one I made for myself at Christminster?"

"Oh yes. How was that made?"

"I altered my old one by cutting up all the Epistles and Gospels into separate brochures, and rearranging them in chronological order as written, beginning the book with Romans, following on with the early Epistles, and putting the Gospels much further on. Then I had the volume rebound. My University friend Mr. (but never mind his name, poor boy) said it was an excellent idea. I know that reading it afterwards made it twice as interesting as before, and twice as understandable."

"H'm!" said Jude, with a sense of sacrilege.

"And what a literary enormity this is," she said, as she glanced into the pages of Solomon's Song. "I mean the synopsis at the head of each chapter, explaining away the real nature of that rhapsody. You needn't be alarmed: nobody claims inspiration for the chapter headings. Indeed, many divines treat them with contempt. It seems the drollest thing to think of the four-and-twenty elders, or bishops, or whatever number they were, sitting with long faces and writing down such misinformation."

Jude looked pained. "You are quite Voltairean!" he murmured.

"Indeed? Then I won't say any more, except that people have no right to falsify the Bible! I hate such humbug as could attempt to plaster over with ecclesiastical abstractions such ecstatic, natural, human love as lies in that great and passionate song!" Her speech had grown spirited, and almost petulant at his rebuke, and her eyes moist. "I wish I had a friend here to support me; but nobody is ever on my side!"

"But, my dear Sue, my very dear Sue, I am not against