have traced it to the very source of its origin; so as to show not
then only, not to the contemporaries only, but (which would be much more
important) to after generations, who might suspect some mistake in their
ancestors as explaining their meaning, or in themselves as understanding
it. What it really means, I am persuaded, is merely to express that the
day was, of all historical days, the most important. What! do people
never reflect on the [Greek: to] positive of their reading? If they
_did_, they would remember that the very idea of a great cardinal event,
as of the foundation of the Olympiads, was as an arrest, a pausing, of
time; causing you to hang and linger on that time. And the grandeur of
this Jewish Waterloo in which God established possessions for His people
and executed an earthly day of judgment on the ancient polluters
(through perhaps a thousand years) of the sacred land (already sacred as
the abode and burying-place of His first servants under a covenant) was
expressed by saying that the day lingered, arrested itself by a burthen
of glorious revolution so mighty as this great day of overthrow. For
remember this: Would not God have changed Pharaoh's heart, so
intractable, by such a miracle, had it been at all open to His eternal
laws? Whereas, if you say, Aye, but on that account why grant even so
much distinction to the day as your ancestor does? answer, it was the
_final-cause_ day.

The English Church pretends to give away the Bible without note or
comment, or--which, in fact, is the meaning--any impulse or bias to the
reader's mind. The monstrous conceit of the Protestant Churches, viz.,
the right of private judgment (which is, in effect, like the right to
talk nonsense, or the right to criticise Sir John Herschel's books
without mathematics), is thus slavishly honoured. Yet all is deception.
Already in the translation at many hundred points she has laid a
restraining bias on the reader, already by the division of verses,
already by the running abstracts over the Prophets, she has done this.

Can the power adequated to a generation of minds, or to a succession of
many generations, find its comprehension in an individual? Can the might
which overflows the heaven of heavens be confined within a local
residence like that which twice reared itself by its foundations, and
three times by its battlements, above the threshing-floor of
Araunah?[33] Of that mystery, of that local circumscription--in what