“Hence comment after comment, spun as fine As bloated spiders draw the flimsy line; Hence the same word that bids our lusts obey, Is misapplied to sanctify their sway. If stubborn Greek refuse to be his friend, Hebrew or Syriac shall be forced to bend: If languages and copies all cry, No! Somebody proved it centuries ago.” Burns was never any too backward in having his fling at a “minister”; and there is exceptional (and perhaps exceptionable) gusto in his averment that, “E’en ministers, they have been kenn’d, In holy rapture, A rousing _whid_, at times, to vend, And nail’t wi’ Scripture.” There was a time in the life of Diderot when that freest of free-thinkers made a living, such as it was, by writing sermons to order—half a dozen of them, for instance, a missionary bespoke for the Portuguese colonies, and is said to have paid for them very handsomely at fifty crowns each. Mr. Carlyle is caustic in his commemoration of this incident in Denis Diderot’s career. “Further, he made sermons, to order; as the Devil is said to quote Scripture.” In Mr. Carlyle’s latest and longest history, we find once and again the like allusion. Frederick William, and his advisers, bent on a certain match for the Princess Wilhelmina, which the queen, her mother, as steadfastly opposed, took to quoting Scripture by way of subduing her majesty’s resistance. “There was much discourse, suasive, argumentative. Grumkow quoting Scripture on her majesty, as the devil can on occasion,” says Wilhelmina. “Express scriptures, ‘Wives, be obedient to your husbands,’ and the like texts; but her majesty, on the Scripture side, too, gave him as much as he brought.” And at a later stage of the negotiation, the same Grumkow appears again, citing the Vulgate to a confidential correspondent, in reference to their political schemings. “But ‘_Si Deus est nobiscum_’—‘If God be for us, who can be against us?’ For the Grumkow can quote Scripture; nay, solaces himself with it, which is a feat beyond what the devil is competent to.” Shakespeare embodies in Richard of Gloster a type of the political intriguer of this complexion; as where that usurper thus answers the gulled associates who urge him to be avenged on the opposite faction: “But then I sigh, and with a piece of Scripture, Tell them, that God bids us do good for evil. And thus I clothe my naked villany With old odd ends, stolen forth of holy writ; And seem a saint when most I play the devil.”