“Many,” he replied, “so many that it were tedious to detail them.  But you are quite mistaken if you suppose it possible that even God can employ any moral methods which man cannot evade; how much less the fools who think they can improve upon his!  The wisdom of God,” said he, with a melancholy smile, “is no match for the ingenuity of man.  As to your present question, you know there have been persons who have continually complained in your world that prophecy is so obscure that the event cannot be certainly known to have been referred to by it, or else so plain that, ipso facto, it proves that the prediction must have been composed after the event.  Now it was precisely in attempting the juste milieu between these extremes that our prophetical speculators wrecked themselves.  Men always had it to say that their prophecies had been either too plain or too obscure; or, if very plain, and yet as plainly written before the event, that their very plainness had insured their own accomplishment by prompting to the very actions and conduct they so clearly indicated!”

“I can easily conceive that,” I answered.  “But now for another problem.  Not a few of our older infidels complained of the revelation in the Bible on the score that the maxims of conduct which it delivers are too general to be of any use, because the application of them is still left to be adjusted by a reference to particular circumstances; and that, if a revelation were framed, it ought to take in all the limitations of action, and furnish, in fact, a complete system of casuistry; otherwise it would be of no avail.  Were there none who attempted this task?”

“Five-and-twenty men,” he answered, “who were destined to be a torment to one another, were instructed to compile such a system of rules, and publish them for the benefit of a certain community as an infallible rule of life.”

“And have they completed it?”

“Completed it!  They have been sitting now for two hundred years, and have not yet exhausted the infinitude of cases to be digested under their very first capitulary.”  He said that being all of them ingenious men, all anxious to show their ingenuity, and knowing that their credit was staked upon the completeness of their system, it was incredible what strange and ridiculous contingencies and combinations of circumstance they had suggested as modifying the application of their general rules.  The books of law, voluminous as they are in most civilized countries, were conciseness itself compared with this new code of morals.  It was thought by many, that the labors of the commissioners would not come to an end till long after the race for whose benefit it was designed had ceased to exist.  Afraid, apparently, of such a direful contingency, they had published, about three years before, the first part, in seventy-five folio volumes, containing limitations, illustrative cases, exceptions, and modifications, in relation to that very obscure general maxim, ’Do unto others as