Page:Philobiblion.djvu/130

100 O singular serenity of writing, to practise which the Artificer of the world stoops down, at whose dread name every knee doth bow! O venerable handicraft pre-eminent above all other crafts that are practised by the hand of man, to which our Lord humbly inclines His breast, to which the finger of God is applied, performing the office of a pen! We do not read of the Son of God that He sowed or ploughed, wove or digged; nor did any other of the mechanic arts befit the divine wisdom incarnate except to trace letters in writing, that every gentleman and sciolist may know that fingers are given by God to men for the task of writing rather than for war. Wherefore we entirely approve the judgment of books, wherein they declared in our sixth chapter the clerk who cannot write to be as it were disabled.

God himself inscribes the just in the book of the living; Moses received the tables of stone written with the finger of God. Job desires that he himself that judgeth would write a book. Belshazzar trembled when he saw the fingers of a man's hand writing upon the wall, Mene tekel phares. I wrote, says Jeremiah, with ink in the book. Christ bids his beloved disciple John, What thou seest write in a book. So the office of the writer is enjoined on Isaiah and on Joshua, that