Much superior to the passages respecting the Battle of the
Gods are those which represent the divine nature as it really
is—pure and great and undefiled; for example, what is said of
Poseidon.

Her far-stretching ridges, her forest-trees, quaked in dismay,
And her peaks, and the Trojans' town, and the ships of Achaia's
array,
Beneath his immortal feet, as onward Poseidon strode.
Then over the surges he drave: leapt, sporting before the God,
Sea-beasts that uprose all round from the depths, for their king
they knew,
And for rapture the sea was disparted, and onward the car-steeds
flew[1].

Then how does Longinus conclude? Why, very strangely—very strangely indeed, whether you take the treatise to be by that Longinus, the Rhetorician and Zenobia's adviser, whom the Emperor Aurelian put to death, or prefer to believe it the work of an unknown hand in the first century. The treatise goes on:

Similarly, the legislator of the Jews [Moses], no ordinary man, having formed and expressed a worthy conception of the might of the Godhead, writes at the very beginning of his Laws, 'God said'—What? 'Let there be light, and there was light'

IV

So here, Gentlemen, you have Plato, Aristotle, Longinus—all Greeks of separate states—men of eminence all three, and two of surpassing eminence, all three and each in his time and turn treating Homer reverently as Holy Writ and yet enjoying it liberally as poetry. For indeed the true Greek mind had no thought to separate poetry from religion, as to the true Greek mind reverence and liberty to enjoy, with the liberty of mind that helps to enjoy, were all tributes to the same divine thing. They had no professionals, no puritans, to hedge it off with a taboo: and so when the last and least of the three, Longinus, comes to our Holy Writ—the sublime poetry in which Christendom reads its God—his open mind at once recognises it as poetry and as sublime. 'God said, Let there be light: and there was light.' If Longinus could treat this as sublime poetry, why cannot we, who have translated and made it ours?

V

Are we forbidden on the ground that our Bible is directly inspired? Well, inspiration, as Sir William Davenant observed and rather wittily proved, in his Preface to "Gondibert," 'is a dangerous term.' It is dangerous mainly because it is a relative term, a term of degrees. You may say definitely of some things that the writer was inspired, as you may certify a certain man to be mad—that is, so thoroughly and convincingly mad that you can order him under restraint. But quite a number of us are (as they say in my part of the world) 'not exactly,' and one or two of us here and there at moments may have a touch even of inspiration. So of the Bible itself: I suppose that few nowadays would contend it to be all inspired equally. 'No' you may say, 'not all equally: but all of it directly, as no other book is.'

To that I might answer, 'How do you know that direct inspiration ceased with the Revelation of St John the Divine, and closed the book? It may be: but how do you know, and what authority have you to say that Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey," for example, or Browning's great Invocation of Love was not directly inspired? Certainly the men who wrote them were rapt above themselves: and, if not directly, Why indirectly, and how?'

But I pause on the edge of a morass, and spring back to firmer ground. Our Bible, as we have it, is a translation, made by forty-seven men and published in the year 1611. The original—and I am still on firm ground because I am quoting now from "The Cambridge History of English Literature"—'either proceeds from divine inspiration, as some will have it, or, according to others, is the fruit of the religious genius of the Hebrew race. From either point of view the authors are highly gifted individuals' [!]—