, instead of this,
he enters the city with denunciation and malediction in his mouth,
crying, "Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown."

We have now to consider this supposed missionary in the last act of his
mission; and here it is that the malevolent spirit of a Bible-prophet,
or of a predicting priest, appears in all that blackness of character
that men ascribe to the being they call the devil.

Having published his predictions, he withdrew, says the story, to the
east side of the city.--But for what? not to contemplate in retirement
the mercy of his Creator to himself or to others, but to wait, with
malignant impatience, the destruction of Nineveh. It came to pass,
however, as the story relates, that the Ninevites reformed, and that
God, according to the Bible phrase, repented him of the evil he had said
he would do unto them, and did it not. This, saith the first verse of
the last chapter, displeased Jonah exceedingly and he was very angry.
His obdurate heart would rather that all Nineveh should be destroyed,
and every soul, young and old, perish in its ruins, than that his
prediction should not be fulfilled. To expose the character of a prophet
still more, a gourd is made to grow up in the night, that promises him
an agreeable shelter from the heat of the sun, in the place to which he
is retired; and the next morning it dies.

Here the rage of the prophet becomes excessive, and he is ready to
destroy himself. "It is better, said he, for me to die than to live."
This brings on a supposed expostulation between the Almighty and the
prophet; in which the former says, "Doest thou well to be angry for the
gourd? And Jonah said, I do well to be angry even unto death. Then
said the Lord, Thou hast had pity on the gourd, for which thou hast
not laboured, neither madest it to grow, which came up in a night, and
perished in a night; and should not I spare Nineveh, that great city,
in which are more than threescore thousand persons, that cannot discern
between their right hand and their left?"

Here is both the winding up of the satire, and the moral of the fable.
As a satire, it strikes against the character of all the Bible-prophets,
and against all the indiscriminate judgements upon men, women and
children, with which this lying book, the bible, is crowded; such as
Noah's flood, the destruction of the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, the
extirpation of the Canaanites, even to suckling infants, and women with
chil