According to this doctrine of Mr. Rogers, it would not have been profane in an unbelieving Jew to make game of Moses, David, and the Prophets, whenever they were quoted by Paul.  The Jew most profoundly believed that Paul quoted the old Scriptures in a false, as well as in a new meaning.  One Christian divine does not feel free to ridicule the words of Paul when quoted erroneously (as he thinks) by another Christian divine?  Why then, when quoted by me?  I hold it to be a great insolence to deny my right to quote Paul or David, as much as Plato or Homer, and adopt their language whenever I find it to express my sentiment.  Mr. Rogers’s claim to deride highly spiritual truth, barely because I revere it, is a union of inhumanity and impiety.  He has nowhere shown that Paul meant something “totally different” from the sense which I put on his words.  I know that he cannot.  I do not pretend always to bind myself to the definite sense of my predecessors; nor did the writers of the New Testament.  They often adopt and apply in an avowedly new sense the words of the Old Testament; so does Dr. Watts with the Hebrew Psalms.  Such adaptation, in the way of development and enlargement, when done with sincerely pious intention, has never been reproved or forbidden by Christians, Whether I am wise or unwise in my interpretations, the subject is a sacred one, and I treat it solemnly; and no errors in my “logic” can justify Mr. Rogers in putting on the mask of a profane sceptic, who scoffs (not once or twice, but through a long book) at the most sacred and tender matters, such as one always dreads to bring before a promiscuous public, lest one cast pearls before swine.  And yet unless devotional books be written, especially by those who have as yet no church, how are we to aid one another in the uphill straggle to maintain some elements of a heavenly life?  Can anything be more heartless, or more like the sneering devil they talk of, than Mr. Harrington?  And here one who professes himself a religions man, and who deliberately, after protest, calls me an INFIDEL, is not satisfied with having scoffed in an hour of folly—­(in such an hour, I can well believe, that melancholy record the “Eclipse of Faith,” was first penned)—­but he persists in justifying his claim to jeer and snarl and mutilate, and palm upon me senses which he knows are deliberately disavowed by me, all the while pretending that it is my bad logic which justifies him!  We know that very many religious men are bad logicians:  if I am as puzzle-headed a fool as Mr. Rogers would make people think me, how does that justify his mocking at my religion?  He justifies himself on the ground that I criticize the New Testament as freely as I should Cicero (p. 147).  Well, then let him criticize me, as freely (and with as little of suppression) as I criticize it.  But I do not laugh at it; God forbid!  The reader will see how little reason Mr. Rogers had to imagine that I had not read so far as to see Harrington’s defence; which defence is, either an insolent assumption, or at any rate not to the purpose.