in whom they confided went up the mountain & came down again bringing
them word


The draft unfortunately leaves off here, and we are unable to know for
certain whether this Shelleyan paradox, greatly daring, meant to
minimize the importance of the 'only public revelation' granted to the
chosen people. But we have enough to understand the general trend of
the argument. It did not actually intend to sap the foundations of
Scriptural authority. But it was bold enough to risk a little shaking
in order to prove that the Sacred Books of the Greeks and Romans did
not, after all, present us with a much more rickety structure. This
was a task of conciliation rather than destruction. And yet even this
conservative view of the Shelleys' exegesis cannot--and will not--
detract from the value of the above document. Surely, this curious
theory of the equal 'inspiration' of Polytheism and the Jewish or
Christian religions, whether it was invented or simply espoused by
Mrs. Shelley, evinces in her--for the time being at least--a very
considerable share of that adventurous if somewhat uncritical alacrity
of mind which carried the poet through so many religious and political
problems. It certainly vindicates her, more completely perhaps than
anything hitherto published, against the strictures of those who knew
her chiefly or exclusively in later years, and could speak of her as a
'most conventional slave', who 'even affected the pious dodge', and
'was not a suitable companion for the poet'. [Footnote: Trelawny's
letter, 3 April 1870; in Mr. H. Buxton Forman's edition, 1910, p.
229.] Mrs. Shelley--at twenty-three years of age--had not yet run the
full 'career of her humour'; and her enthusiasm for classical
mythology may well have, later on, gone the way of her admiration for
Spinoza, whom she read with Shelley that winter (1820-1), as Medwin