and again as he who “Said, when all Time’s sea was foam, ‘Let there be Rome,’ and there was Rome.” And Victor Hugo did not shrink from describing, and that with a strange and scandalous ignorance of the original incidents, the crucifixion by Louis Napoleon of the Christ of nations. Now, Scripture is literature, besides being a great deal more; and, as such, it is absurd to object to all allusions to it in other literature. Yet the tendency of which these extracts are examples is not merely toward allusion, but desecration of solemn and sacred thoughts: it is the conversion of incense into perfumery. There is another development of the same tendency, by no means modern, noted by the prophet when he complains that the message of God has become as the “very lovely song of one who hath a pleasant voice and playeth well on an instrument.” Wherever divine service is only appreciated in so far as it is “well rendered,” as rich music or stately enunciation charm the ear, and the surroundings are æsthetic,—wherever the gospel is heard with enjoyment only of the eloquence or controversial skill of its rendering, wherever religion is reduced by the cultivated to a thrill or to a solace, or by the Salvationist to a riot or a romp, wherever Isaiah and the Psalms are only admired as poetry, and heaven is only thought of as a languid and sentimental solace amid wearying cares,—there again is a making of the sacred balms to smell thereto. And as often as a minister of God finds in his holy office a mere outlet for his natural gifts of rhetoric or of administration, he also is tempted to commit this crime. FOOTNOTES: [41] For it is incredible that, in a catalogue of furniture which included Aaron’s rod and the pot of manna, this altar should be omitted, and “a golden censer,” elsewhere unheard of, substituted. The gloss is too evidently an endeavour to get rid of a difficulty. But in idea and suggestion this altar belonged to the Most Holy. That shrine “had” it, though it actually stood outside. CHAPTER XXXI. _BEZALEEL AND AHOLIAB._ xxxi. 1–18. Next after this marking off so sharply of the holy from the profane, this consecration of men to special service, this protection of sacred unguents and sacred gums from secular use, we come upon a passage curiously contrasted, yet not really antagonistic to the last, of marvellous practical wisdom, and well calculated to make a nation wise and great.