Do you, Miles Howard, think that he has made you his confidant?  Tell me of the height of the mountains of the moon, or of the diameter of space, and I may believe you, but of the secret history of the Almighty, and I shall pronounce thee mad.  Yet we have a sort of family history of our God,—­so have the Tahitians of theirs,—­and some old poet’s grand imagination is imposed on us as adamantine everlasting truth, and God’s own word!  Pythagoras says, truly enough, “A true assertion respecting God, is an assertion of God”; but we may well doubt if there is any example of this in literature.

The New Testament is an invaluable book, though I confess to having been slightly prejudiced against it in my very early days by the church and the Sabbath school, so that it seemed, before I read it, to be the yellowest book in the catalogue.  Yet I early escaped from their meshes.  It was hard to get the commentaries out of one’s head and taste its true flavor.—­I think that Pilgrim’s Progress is the best sermon which has been preached from this text; almost all other sermons that I have heard, or heard of, have been but poor imitations of this.—­It would be a poor story to be prejudiced against the Life of Christ because the book has been edited by Christians.  In fact, I love this book rarely, though it is a sort of castle in the air to me, which I am permitted to dream.  Having come to it so recently and freshly, it has the greater charm, so that I cannot find any to talk with about it.  I never read a novel, they have so little real life and thought in them.  The reading which I love best is the scriptures of the several nations, though it happens that I am better acquainted with those of the Hindoos, the Chinese, and the Persians, than of the Hebrews, which I have come to last.  Give me one of these Bibles and you have silenced me for a while.  When I recover the use of my tongue, I am wont to worry my neighbors with the new sentences; but commonly they cannot see that there is any wit in them.  Such has been my experience with the New Testament.  I have not yet got to the crucifixion, I have read it over so many times.  I should love dearly to read it aloud to my friends, some of whom are seriously inclined; it is so good, and I am sure that they have never heard it, it fits their case exactly, and we should enjoy it so much together,—­but I instinctively despair of getting their ears.  They soon show, by signs not to be mistaken, that it is inexpressibly wearisome to them.  I do not mean to imply that I am any better than my neighbors; for, alas!  I know that I am only as good, though I love better books than they.