172. Text Sparring.
When I hear (as who now can travel twenty miles in a stage coach without the probability of hearing!) an ignorant religionist quote an unconnected sentence of half a dozen words from any part of the old or new testament, and resting on the literal sense of these words the eternal misery of all who reject, nay, even of all those countless myriads, who have never had the opportunity of accepting, this, and sundry other articles of faith conjured up by the same textual magic; I ask myself, what idea these persons form of the bible, that they should use it in a way which they themselves use no other book in? They deem the whole written by inspiration. Well! but is the very essence of rational discourse, i.e. connection and dependency, done away, because the discourse is infallibly rational? The mysteries, which these spiritual Lynxes detect in the simplest texts, remind me of the 500 non-descripts, each as large as his own black cat, which Dr. Katterfelto, by aid of his solar microscope, discovered in a drop of transparent water.
But to a contemporary, who has not thrown his lot in the same helmet with them, these fanatics think it a crime to listen. Let them then, or far rather, let those who are in danger of infection from them, attend to the golden aphorisms of the old and orthodox divines. "Sentences in scripture (says Dr. Donne) like hairs in horsetails, concur in one root of beauty and strength; but being plucked out, one by one, serve only for springes and snares."
The second I transcribe from the preface to Lightfoot's works. "Inspired writings are an inestimable treasure to mankind, for so many sentences, so many truths. But then the true sense of them must be known: otherwise, so many sentences, so many authorized falsehoods.