Some of the congregation were greatly disappointed. They had expected a
brilliant and startling attack upon some other Bible personages who had
hitherto been looked on with respect and admiration. But the sermon
had only attacked the Jewish system as a whole, and everyone knows that
there is nothing piquant in an attack, however eloquent it may be, upon
a religious system in the abstract. One might as well find entertainment
in an attack upon the Magnetic Pole or a denunciation of the Precession
of the Equinoxes. No one cared, they said, anything more about the
failure of the laws of Moses than one did about such abstractions as the
Earth's Axis, or the Great Glacial Epoch. It was quite different when
the characters of well-known individuals were subjected to an assault.
People could listen for hours to an attack upon celebrated persons.
If Mr. Holland's book had only dealt with the characteristics of the
religion of the Jews, it would never have attracted attention, these
critics said. It had called for notice simply because of its trenchant
remarks in regard to some of those Bible celebrities who, it was
generally understood, were considered worthy of admiration.

Why could Mr. Holland not have followed up the course indicated in his
book by showing up some of the other persons in the Bible? it was asked.
There were quite a number of characters in the Bible who were regarded
as estimable. Why could he not then have followed up his original scheme
of "showing them up?"--that was the phrase of the critics. There was
Solomon, for instance. He was usually regarded as a person of high
intellectual gifts; but there was surely a good deal in his career which
was susceptible of piquant treatment. And then someone said that Noah
should have a chapter all to himself, also Lot; and what about the spies
who had entered Jericho? Could the imagination not suggest the story
which they had told to their wives on their return to the camp, relative
to the house in which they had passed all their spare time? They