Christian England to apprehend,
however exhorted by her gifted and guid.

57. "But Byron was not thinking of such things!"--He, the reprobate! how
should such as he think of Christ?

Perhaps not wholly as you or I think of Him. Take, at chance, another
line or two, to try:

"Carnage (so Wordsworth tells you) is God's daughter;[77]
If he speak truth, she is Christ's sister, and
Just now, behaved as in the Holy Land."

Blasphemy, cry you, good reader? Are you sure you understand it? The
first line I gave you was easy Byron--almost shallow Byron--these are of
the man in his depth, and you will not fathom them, like a tarn--nor in
a hurry.

"Just now behaved as in the Holy Land." How _did_ Carnage behave in the
Holy Land then? You have all been greatly questioning, of late, whether
the sun, which you find to be now going out, ever stood still. Did you
in any lagging minute, on those scientific occasions, chance to reflect
what he was bid stand still _for_? or if not--will you please look--and
what also, going forth again as a strong man to run his course, he saw,
rejoicing?

"Then Joshua passed from Makkedah unto Libnah--and fought against
Libnah. And the Lord delivered it and the king thereof into the hand of
Israel, and he smote it with the edge of the sword, and all the souls
that were therein." And from Lachish to Eglon, and from Eglon to
Kirjath-Arba, and Sarah's grave in the Amorites' land, "and Joshua smote
all the country of the hills and of the south--and of the vale and of
the springs, and all their kings: he left none remaining, but utterly
destroyed all that breathed--as the Lord God of Israel commanded."

58. Thus, "it is written": though you perhaps do not so often hear
_these_ texts preached from, as certain others about taking away the
sins of the world. I wonder how the world would like to part with them!
hitherto it has always preferred parting first with its life--and God
has taken it at its word. But Death is not _His_ Begotten Son, for all
that; nor is the death of the innocent in battle carnage His "instrument
for working out a pure intent" as Mr. Wordsworth puts it; but Man's
instrument for working out an impure one, as Byron would have you to
know. Theology perhaps less orthodox, but certainly more
reverent;--neither is the Woolwich Infant a Child of God; neither does
the iron-clad "Thunderer" utter thunders of God--which facts if you had
had the grace or sense to learn from Byron, in