The ancients strongly expressed their sense of the
unmanageableness of these words of the spirit by saying, that the God
made his priest insane, took him hither and thither as leaves are
whirled by the tempest. But we sing as we are bid. Our inspirations
are very manageable and tame. Death and sin have whispered in the
ear of the wild horse of Heaven, and he has become a dray and a hack.
And step by step with the entrance of this era of ease and
convenience, the belief in the proper Inspiration of man has
departed.
Literary accomplishments, skill in grammar and rhetoric,
knowledge of books, can never atone for the want of things which
demand voice. Literature is a poor trick when it busies itself to
make words pass for things. The most original book in the world is
the Bible. This old collection of the ejaculations of love and
dread, of the supreme desires and contritions of men proceeding out
of the region of the grand and eternal, by whatsoever different
mouths spoken, and through a wide extent of times and countries,
seems, especially if you add to our canon the kindred sacred writings
of the Hindoos, Persians, and Greeks, the alphabet of the nations, --
and all posterior literature either the chronicle of facts under very
inferior ideas, or, when it rises to sentiment, the combinations,
analogies, or degradations of this.
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