There are in literature abundant examples of the condensed logic of wit,--the logic that exposes a fallacy, answers an objection and demolishes an argument, without resorting to major and minor premise and formal conclusion. One or two of these may pave the way to the main purpose of this chapter. "Where was your Protestant Church before Luther?" asked a Catholic of Wilkes. "Did you wash your face this morning?" said Wilkes. "I did, sir." "Where was your face before you washed it?" The logic of wit as employed by Dr. Johnson, is referred to by George Eliot. On one occasion it was debated whether a clergyman who had five years before been guilty of some grave sin should be reinstated. Johnson inquired whether the man had repented. It was admitted that he had. "Then," said Johnson, "if he has repented, is he not good enough to go to heaven?" "Certainly." "Why, sir, then there is no objection. A man who is good enough to go to heaven is good enough to be a clergyman." Johnson denounced Lord Bolingbroke in the following immortal analogy: "Sir, he was a scoundrel and a coward; a scoundrel for charging a blunderbuss against religion and morality, a coward because he had not resolution enough to fire it off himself, but left half-a-crown to a beggarly Scotchman to draw the trigger after his death." A certain clergyman who had been addicted to bawling and roaring in the pulpit said, "I once thought it was the thunder that killed, and know now that it is the lightning that does the execution. I mean to thunder less and lighten more." Sir Thomas Overbury punctures certain pretensions thus: "The man who has not anything to boast of but his illustrious ancestors, is like a potato--the only good belonging to him is underground." Thompson, of the _Westminster Review_, defended the Radicals against the attacks of the Whigs in this manner: "Noah was a Radical when, hearing the world was to be drowned, he went about such a commonsense proceeding as making for himself a ship to swim in. An antediluvian Whig would have laid together half-a-dozen sticks for an ark and called it a 'virtual representation.'" The principle that underlies these instances is obvious. The form may vary but in every case there is an analogy that serves all the purposes of formal logic,--"an analogy which immediately exposes the absurdity of an action or proposition." The writers of the Bible understood and employed the same principle. I.