proud of his legs is not vulgar; somehow we feel that
they were legs to be proud of. And it is exactly this that we must look
for in these _Sketches_. We must not leap to any cheap fancy that they
are low farces. Rather we must see that they are not low farces; and see
that nobody but Dickens could have prevented them from being so.

PICKWICK PAPERS

There are those who deny with enthusiasm the existence of a God and are
happy in a hobby which they call the Mistakes of Moses. I have not
studied their labours in detail, but it seems that the chief mistake of
Moses was that he neglected to write the Pentateuch. The lesser errors,
apparently, were not made by Moses, but by another person equally
unknown. These controversialists cover the very widest field, and their
attacks upon Scripture are varied to the point of wildness. They range
from the proposition that the unexpurgated Bible is almost as unfit for
an American girls' school as is an unexpurgated Shakespeare; they
descend to the proposition that kissing the Book is almost as
hygienically dangerous as kissing the babies of the poor. A superficial
critic might well imagine that there was not one single sentence left of
the Hebrew or Christian Scriptures which this school had not marked with
some ingenious and uneducated comment. But there is one passage at least
upon which they have never pounced, at least to my knowledge; and in
pointing it out to them I feel that I am, or ought to be, providing
material for quite a multitude of Hyde Park orations. I mean that
singular arrangement in the mystical account of the Creation by which
light is created first and all the luminous bodies afterwards. One could
not imagine a process more open to the elephantine logic of the
Bible-smasher than this: that the sun should be created after the
sunlight. The conception that lies at the back of the phrase is indeed
profoundly antagonistic to much of the modern point of view. To many
modern people it would sound like saying that foliage existed before the
first leaf; it would sound like saying that childhood existed before a
baby was born. The idea is, as I have said, alien to most modern
thought, and like many other ideas which are alien to most modern
thought, it is a very subtle and a very sound idea. Whatever be the
meaning of the passage in the actual primeval poem, there is a very real
metaphysical meaning in the idea that light existed before the sun and
stars. It is no