" In the country of Theocritus this custom is
said still to prevail: when a couple are married the attendants place
honey in their mouths, by which they would symbolize the hope that
their love may be as sweet to their souls as honey to the palate.
It was fabled that Homer was suckled by a priestess whose breasts
distilled honey; and that once when Pindar lay asleep the bees dropped
honey upon his lips. In the Old Testament the food of the promised
Immanuel was to be butter and honey (there is much doubt about the
butter in the original), that he might know good from evil; and
Jonathan's eyes were enlightened, by partaking of some wood or wild
honey: "See, I pray you, how mine eyes have been enlightened, because I
tasted a little of this honey." So far as this part of his diet was
concerned, therefore, John the Baptist, during his sojourn in the
wilderness, his divinity school-days in the mountains and plains of
Judea, fared extremely well. About the other part, the locusts,
or, not to put too fine a point on it, the grasshoppers, as much cannot
be said, though they were among the creeping and leaping things the
children of Israel were permitted to eat.
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