As my eye ran over the items of the poor man's goods ordered to sale for the most worshipful Bishop Donohue—the consecrated disciple of Christ who didn't even have as much of a home as the foxes and the birds—I might have thought of one or two blistering passages in the glorious old Code of Moses; I might have recalled some of the bitterest of the words of Jesus Christ, against those rich, haughty, unmerciful lordlings who grind the faces of the poor.
But I did not: on the contrary, that passage in "Gath's" novel rose out of the mist of 30 years, and brought back the plaintive lament of the household goods, seized, carried away, and sold into strange hands to pay a trifling debt. "Gath," following literary tradition, most canonically chose Jews to act as shylocks: it would never have occurred to him that a consecrated Bishop of Jesus Christ could sell the poor Christian's blanket off the bed, sell the bed itself, sell the table at which the family ate, and the chairs that they sat on. Not only the mattress on which the tired limbs of labor stretched themselves to rest, and the pillows upon which the aching head had lain, but the very broom which swept the floor, had to be seized to satisfy the rent of this godly landlord, the Bishop of a homeless Christ!
To make this picture perfect, the family Bible ought to have been levied on—and this Catholic Bishop ought to have bought it in. Having acquired the Book in that manner, a natural curiosity might have prompted him to read it.
One thing, however, the most worshipful Bishop might yet do: he might take the proceeds of the sale of Hawley's beds, mattresses, pillows, stove, dishes, comforts, blankets, chairs and broom—and contribute the whole sum to Foreign Missions.
* * * * * * *
"Thou shalt not commit adultery!"
All Christians take their laws and their religion more or less from the Jews. Who the Jews took it from, is another question. Skeptical scholars say that they took it from the older peoples of the East, of the Nile, the Euphrates: orthodox Christianity maintains that they took it by revelation direct from Jehovah. Therefore, every sect in Christendom stands committed to the proposition that God Almighty, clothed in all His terrors, with the clouds darkening the skies, the thunders for His heralds and the lightenings for the flaming swords that went before His face, came down to Sinai, and wrote upon the everlasting tablets,
" Thou shalt not commit adultery! "
(Doway Bible: Deut. xx:14. I will hereafter use this Roman Catholic version as the true one, thus avoiding any dispute with papists as to the accuracy of my quotations.)
In this Doway, or Douay, a version of the Book, we are somewhat patly told that the first thing which Adam did, after having been dispossessed of Eden, was to know "Eve his wife, who conceived and brought forth Cain, saying, I have gotten a man through God."