Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 39.djvu/542

526 so far as I know, there is no provision in the law against the practice of the calling of a tax-gatherer by a Jew. The publican was in fact very much in the position of an Irish process-server at the present day—more, rather than less, despised and hated on account of the perfect legality of his occupation. Except for certain sacrificial purposes, pigs were held in such abhorrence by the ancient Egyptians that swineherds were not permitted to enter a temple, or to intermarry with other castes; and any one who had, even accidentally, touched a pig was unclean. But these very regulations prove that pig-keeping was not illegal; it merely involved certain civil and religious disabilities. For the Jews, dogs were typically "unclean" animals; but, when that eminently pious Hebrew, Tobit, "went forth" with the angel "the young man's dog" went "with them" (Tobit v, 16) without apparent remonstrance from the celestial guide. I really do not see how an appeal to the law could have justified any one in drowning Tobit's dog, on the ground that his master was keeping and feeding an animal quite as "unclean" as any pig. Certainly the excellent Raguel must have failed to see the harm of dog-keeping, for we are told that, on the travelers' return homeward, "the dog went after them" (xi, 4).

Until better light than I have been able to obtain is thrown upon the subject, therefore, it is obvious that Mr. Gladstone's argumentative house has been built upon an extremely slippery quicksand; perhaps even has no foundation at all.

Yet another "point" does not seem to have occurred to Mr. Gladstone, who is so much shocked that I attach no overwhelming weight to the assertions contained in the synoptic Gospels, even when all three concur. These Gospels agree in stating, in the most express, and, to some extent verbally identical, terms, that the devils entered the pigs at their own request, and the third Gospel (viii, 31) tells us what the motive of the demons was in asking the singular boon: "They entreated him that he would not command them to depart into the abyss." From this, it would seem that the devils thought to exchange the heavy punishment of transportation to the abyss, for the lighter penalty of imprisonment in swine. And some commentators, more ingenious than respectful to the supposed chief actor in this extraordinary fable, have dwelt, with satisfaction, upon the very unpleasant quarter of an hour which the evil spirits must have had, when the headlong rush of their maddened tenements convinced them how completely they were taken in. In the whole story, there is not one