>From "The Gospel According to Saint Matthew" by John Updike in Incarnation: Contemporary Writers on the New Testament, edited by Alfred Corn (Viking, $19.95):
Vitality, perhaps, is the overriding virtue in the Bible, and the New Testament, for all its legalisms, obscurities, repetitions and dark patches, renews the vitality of the Old. From certain verbal prominences, burnished by ages of quotation like kissed toes on bronze statues of saints, and certain refracting facets of the tumbled testamental matter, an iridescence shudders forth which corresponded, in my consciousness as a child, to the vibrant, uncaused moments of sheer grateful happiness that I occasionally experienced. I still have them, these visitations of joy, and still associate them with the Good News. "Know too," Matthew's Gospel ends, "that I am with you every day to the end of time."
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