Diary 1928-1957, entry of 6 October 1941:
The story of the manna gathered and set aside by the Hebrews is deeply significant. It so happened that the manna rotted when it was kept. And perhaps that means that all spiritual reading which is not consumed — by prayer and by works — ends by causing a sort of rotting inside us. You die with a head full of fine sayings and a perfectly empty heart.
The consumption of a comestible is its physiological appropriation. To appropriate is to make one’s own. Green is referring to spiritual appropriation, the making one’s own of spiritual sayings by prayer and practice.
Did edible bread once fall from the sky? I don’t deny it, but must I affirm it? Would it not be enough to take the Old Testament passage in its spiritual sense and bracket the question of its literal truth?
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