“God,” Newman writes, speaks amid the incantations of Balaam, raises Samuel’s spirit in the witch’s cavern, prophesies of the Messia[h] by the tongue of the Sibyl, forces Python [the Oracle of Delphi] to recognize His ministers, and baptizes by the hand of the misbeliever. He is with the heathen dramatist in his denunciations of injustice and tyranny, and his auguries of divine vengeance upon crime. Even on the unseemly legends of a popular mythology He casts His shadow, and is dimly discerned in the ode or epic, as in troubled water or in fantastic dreams. All that is good, all that is true,
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