But certainly I never dreamt of claiming plenary inspiration for the forty-seven.  Nay, if you will have it, they now and again wrote stark nonsense.  Remember that I used this very same word ‘miracle’ of Shakespeare, meaning again that the total Shakespeare quite outpasses my comprehension; yet Shakespeare, too, on occasion talks stark nonsense, or at any rate stark bombast.  He never blotted a line—­’I would he had blotted a thousand’ says Ben Jonson:  and Ben Jonson was right.  Shakespeare could have blotted out two or three thousand lines:  he was great enough to afford it.  Somewhere Matthew Arnold supposes us as challenging Shakespeare over this and that weak or bombastic passage, and Shakespeare answering with his tolerant smile, that no doubt we were right, but after all, ‘Did it greatly matter?’

So we offer no real derogation to the forty-seven in asserting that here and there they wrote nonsense.  They could afford it.  But we do stultify criticism if, adoring the grand total of wisdom and beauty, we prostrate ourselves indiscriminately before what is good and what is bad, what is sublime sense and what is nonsense, and forbid any reviser to put forth a hand to the ark.

The most of us Christians go to church on Christmas Day, and there we listen to this from Isaiah, chapter ix, verses 1-7:—­

Nevertheless the dimness shall not be such as was in her vexation, when at the first he lightly afflicted the land of Zebulun and the land of Naphtali, and afterwards did more grievously afflict her by the way of the sea, beyond Jordan, in Galilee of the nations.

     The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light:  they
     that dwell in the land of the shadow of death, upon them hath the
     light shined.

     Thou hast multiplied the nation, and not increased the joy:  they
     joy before thee according to the joy in harvest, and as men
     rejoice when they divide the spoil.

     For thou hast broken the yoke of his burden, and the staff of his
     shoulder, the rod of his oppressor, as in the day of Midian.

     For every battle of the warrior is with confused noise, and
     garments rolled in blood:  but this shall be with burning and fuel
     of fire.

     For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given.

The forty-seven keep their majestic rhythm.  But have you ever, sitting in church on a Christmas morning, asked yourself what it all means, or if it mean anything more than a sing-song according somehow with the holly and ivy around the pillars? ’Thou hast multiplied the nation, and not increased the joy:  they joy before thee according to the joy in harvest,’ But why—­if the joy be not increased? ’For every battle of the warrior is with confused noise, and garments rolled in blood:  but this shall be with burning and fuel of fire.’ Granted the rhythmical antithesis, where is the real antithesis, the difference, the improvement?  If a battle there must be, how is burning better than garments rolled in blood?  And, in fine, what is it all about?  Now let us turn to the Revised Version:—­