" Robert Hall, a most pious Christian, was
constantly transgressing in this direction, and I have heard Mr. Moody
raise a roar of laughter while preaching.
Now it is quite impossible to say that in any of the above cases there
was a want of faith, although we are equally unable to agree with those
who maintain that profane jests are most common when it is the
strongest. What they show is a want of control of feeling, or a
deficiency in taste, so that people do not regard such things as either
injurious or important. A sceptic at the present day is generally less
profane than a religious man was in the last century. Such is the result
of civilization, although unbelief in itself inclines to profanity, and
faith to reverence.
It is self-evident that peculiar feelings and convictions will prevent
our regarding things as ludicrous, at which we should otherwise be
highly amused. Religious veneration, or the want of it, often causes
that to appear sacred to one person which seems absurd to another. Many
Jewish stories seem strange to Gentile comprehensions. Elias Levi states
that he had been told by many old and pious rabbis that at the costly
entertainment at which the Messiah should be welcomed among the Jews, an
enormous bird should be killed and roasted, of which the Talmud says
that it once threw an egg out of its nest which crushed three hundred
lofty cedars, and when broken, swept away sixty villages.
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