20. What must have been the astonishment of the crew of the hundreds of ships sailing on the same sea to observe a sudden storm to arise and stop without any natural cause! And when they afterwards learned that the whole thing was brought about by the misconduct of one man in one of the vessels, perhaps hundreds of miles distant, they must have abandoned all idea of ever looking again for natural causes for storms after that occurrence. How repressing such events would be to the growth and cultivation of the intellect, and the study of the natural sciences!
21. How could Jonah remain three days in the whale's stomach without being digested, as fish have astonishing digestive powers? And, if he were not digested, both he and the fish must have been extremely hungry at the end of the three days' fast.
22. As a fish large enough to swallow Jonah could not swim through the shoal-water to reach the land, it becomes an interesting query to know how it got Jonah on to "the dry land." It must have required the use of a powerful emetic to inspire the fish with force sufficient to throw him fifty or a hundred feet.
23. Is it not strange that Jonah's message to the Ninevites should have had such a marvelous effect upon the whole city, when it was evidently delivered in a language that none of them understood?
24. We are told the king issued orders for everybody, including men, women and children, and beasts, to stop eating and drinking, and to be covered with sackcloth. What sin can we suppose the beasts had committed that they must be doomed to starve, and be covered with sackcloth as an emblem of repentance? It must have required an enormous amount of sackcloth to cover two millions of people, and probably as many domestic animals. Where it all came from, the Lord Jehovah only knows. And it seems singular that all of the animals should stand quietly while such an uncouth covering was thrown upon them.
25. It is also difficult to comprehend why a nation of people, who probably never heard of Jehovah before, should all repent in sackcloth and ashes. It is the most effective missionary work we have ever read of. In modern times it requires two hundred missionaries a whole century to make half that many converts.
26. But the most conclusive argument against the truth of the story is found in the fact that it is falsified by the testimony of history. According to her history by Diodorus, Nineveh was destroyed by Arbaces sixteen years before Jonah's time.
27. I have noticed this senseless story at some length, because Christian writers have invested it with great importance, and because it is indorsed by nearly all the New-Testament writers. Even Christ himself indorses it, and compares Jonah's case to his. Their extreme ignorance is evinced by the foregoing exposition.
28. Several similar stories are found in heathen mythology, a few of which we will briefly sketch here. The Hindoo sacred book, the Purans, states that Chrishna was swallowed by a crocodile, and, after remaining three days in its stomach, was thrown upon dry land, much to his relief and also to that of the crocodile. A Grecian demi-God (Hercules), according to Gales, was swallowed by a dog, and remained in his stomach three days. But the story entitled to the premium is one preserved in the legends of some of the Eastern islanders. A man, for some misdemeanor on a voyage across the Indus, was thrown over-board, and swallowed by a shark; but, as the fish still followed the vessel, it was finally caught, and search made for the man, when, to the surprise of the whole crew, he was found sitting bolt upright, playing the tune of "Old Hundred" on a fiddle he had in his possession when he went down the throat of the sea-monster. This was rather a pleasant way of putting in the time. Jonah, it appears, was not so fortunate as to have a fiddle in his possession while in the stomach of the whale. The foregoing ten stories, from that of the serpent to Jonah, have been for hundreds of years printed by the thousand, struck off in almost every known human language, and sent off by ship-loads to almost every nation on the globe, to be placed in the hands of the heathen as being productions of Infinite Wisdom, the inspirations of an All-wise God, and calculated to enlighten them and improve their morals. What sublime nonsense! what egregious folly! And what a deplorable and sorrowful mistake has been thus committed by the blinded disciples of the Christian faith!