tion of truth! Why
do you follow the streams derived from it by the sophistry, or polluted
by the passions, of man?'" It may be conceived that Watson's appeal to
"Scripture" was against the sentence of orthodoxy. His authority as "a
school Divine" is on a par with that of the author of _Cain_, or of an
earlier theologian who "quoted Genesis like a very learned clerk"!]

[90] [Byron breaks through his self-imposed canon with regard to the New
Testament. There are allusions to the doctrine of the Atonement, act i.
sc. I, lines 163-166: act iii. sc. I, lines 85-88; to the descent into
Hades, act i. sc. I, lines 541, 542; and to the miraculous walking on
the Sea of Galilee, act ii. se. i, lines 16-20.]

[91] {209}[The words enclosed in brackets are taken from an original
draft of the Preface.]

[92] [The Manichaeans (the disciples of Mani or Manes, third century
A.D.) held that there were two co-eternal Creators--a God of Darkness
who made the body, and a God of Light who was responsible for the
soul--and that it was the aim and function of the good spirit to rescue
the soul, the spiritual part of man, from the possession and grasp of
the body, which had been created by and was in the possession of the
spirit of evil. St. Augustine passed through a stage of Manicheism, and
in after-life exposed and refuted the heretical tenets which he had
advocated, and with which he was familiar. See, for instance, his
account of the Manichaean heresy "de duplici terra, de regno lucis et
regno tenebrarum" (_Opera_, 1700, viii. 484, c; vide ibid., i. 693, 717;
x. 893, d. etc.).]

[93] [Conan the Jester, a character in the Irish ballads, was "a kind of
Thersites, but brave and daring even to rashness. He had made a vow that
he would never take a blow without returning it; and having ...
descended to the infernal regions, he received a cuff from the
arch-fiend, which he instantly returned, using the expression in the
text ('blow for blow')." Sometimes the proverb is worded thus: "'Claw
for claw, and the devil take the shortest nails,' as Conan said to the
devil."--_Waverley Novels_, 1829 (notes to chap. xxii. of _Waverley_),
i. 241, note 1; see, too, ibid., p. 229.]

[94] [The full title of Warburton's book runs thus: _The Divine Legation
of Moses Demonstrated on the Principles of a Religious Deist; from the
omission of the Doctrine of a Future State of Reward and Punishment in
the Jewish Dispensation_. (See, more particularly (ed. 1741