and the Prophets, but to fulfil them, and the answer is plain, their historic fulfilment was their destruction.
If we look at the Bible as a whole, we find numerous contradictions; conflicting Histories which no skill can reconcile with themselves or with facts; Poems which the Christians have agreed to take as histories, but which lead only to confusion on that hypothesis; Prophecies that have never been fulfilled, and from the nature of things never can be.[1] We find stories of miracles which could not have happened; accounts which represent the laws of nature completely transformed, as in fairy-land, to trust the tales of the old romancers; stories that make God a man of war, cruel, capricious, revengeful, hateful, and not to be trusted. We find amatory songs, selfish proverbs, sceptical discourses, and the most awful imprecations human fancy ever clothed in speech. Connected with these are lofty thoughts of Nature, Man, and God; devotion touching and beautiful, and a most reverent faith. Here are works whose authors are known; others, of which the author, age, and country are alike forgotten. Genuine and spurious works, religious and not religious, are strangely mixed. But the subject demands a more minute and detailed examination in each of its main parts.
- ↑ It is instructive to see that the Greeks sometimes regarded the writings of Homer with the same superstitious veneration which is often paid to the Bible. They found therein the Neptunian and Vulcanian theory; the sphericity of the earth; the doctrines of Democritus, Heraclitus, and of Socrates and Plato in their turn. See Heraclides Ponticus, Alleg. Hom. in Gale, ubi sup. p. 436, et seq., 488, et seq. Pausanias, IX. 41, p. 452, ed. Schubert, seriously urges the question whether any works from the Shop of Vulcan were then in existence. According to Aristotle, (de Part. Animal. III. 10, p. 87, ed. Bekker,) some concluded in his time that the human head could speak when separated from the body—and that on the authority of Homer, “And while he speaks his head was mingled with the dust.” Ilias X. 427. Some quoted Homer to show that Horses had spoken—as some divines quote Moses to prove the same of the Ass.
