Not that even houseless snails melt,—nor that there’s anything about snails at all in David’s psalm, I believe, both Vulgate and LXX. saying ‘wax’ instead, as in Psalms lxviii. 2, xcvii. 5, etc.; but I suppose there’s some reptilian sense in the Hebrew, justifying our translation here—all the more interesting to me because of a puzzle I got into in Isaiah, the other day; respecting which, lest you should fancy I’m too ready to give up Joshua and the sun without taking trouble about them, please observe this very certain condition of your Scriptural studies: that if you read the Bible with predetermination to pick out every text you approve of—that is to say, generally, any that confirm you in the conceit of your own religious sect,—that console you for the consequences of your own faults,—or assure you of a pleasant future though you attend to none of your present duties—on these terms you will find the Bible entirely intelligible, and wholly delightful: but if you read it with a real purpose of trying to understand it, and obey; and so read it all through, steadily, you will find it, out and out, the crabbedest and most difficult book you ever tried; horribly ill written in many parts, according to all human canons; totally unintelligible in others; and with the gold of it only to be got at by a process of crushing in which nothing but the iron teeth of the fiercest and honestest resolution will prevail against its adamant. For instance, take the 16th of Isaiah. Who is to send the Lamb? why is the Lamb to be sent? what does the Lamb mean? There is nothing in the Greek Bible about a Lamb at all, nor is anybody told to send anything. But God says He will send something, apostolically, as reptiles! Then, are the daughters of Moab the outcasts, as in the second verse, or other people, as in the fourth? How is Moab’s throne to be established in righteousness, in the tabernacle of David, in the fifth? What are his lies not to be, in the sixth? And why is he to howl for himself, in the seventh? Ask any of the young jackanapes you put up to chatter out of your pulpits, to tell you even so much as this, of the first half-dozen verses! But above all, ask them who the persons are who are to be sent apostolically as reptiles? Meanwhile, on the way to answer, I’ve got a letter, [45] not from a jackanapes, but a thoroughly learned and modest clergyman, and old friend, advising me of my mistake in April Fors, in supposing that Rahab, in the 89th Psalm, means the harlot. It is, he tells me, a Hebrew word for the Dragon adversary, as in the verse “He hath cut Rahab, and wounded the Dragon.” That will come all the clearer and prettier for us, when we have worked it out, with Rahab herself and all; meantime, please observe what a busy creature she must have been—the stalks of her flax in heaps enough to hide the messengers! doubtless also, she was able to dye her thread of the brightest scarlet, a becoming colour. [46]