But Bibliolatry not only paralyzes the moral sense; it also corrupts the intellect, and introduces a crooked logic, by setting men to the duty of extracting absolute harmony out of discordant materials.  All are familiar with the subtlety of lawyers, whose task it is to elicit a single sense out of a heap of contradictory statutes.  In their case such subtlety may indeed excite in us impatience or contempt; but we forbear to condemn them, when it is pleaded that practical convenience, not truth, is their avowed end.  In the case of theological ingenuity, where truth is the professed and sacred object, a graver judgment is called for.  When the Biblical interpreter struggles to reconcile contradictions, or to prove that wrong is right, merely because he is bound to maintain the perfection of the Bible; when to this end he condescends to sophistry and pettifogging evasions; it is difficult to avoid feeling disgust as well as grief.  Some good people are secretly conscious that the Bible is not an infallible book; but they dread the consequences of proclaiming this “to the vulgar.”  Alas! and have they measured the evils which the fostering of this lie is producing in the minds, not of the educated only, but emphatically of the ministers of religion?

Many who call themselves Christian preachers busily undermine moral sentiment, by telling their hearers, that if they do not believe the Bible (or the Church), they can have no firm religion or morality, and will have no reason to give against following brutal appetite.  This doctrine it is, that so often makes men atheists in Spain, and profligates in England, as soon as they unlearn the national creed:  and the school which have done the mischief, moralize over the wickedness of human nature when it comes to pass instead of blaming the falsehood which they have themselves inculcated.

[Footnote 1:  A critic presses me with the question, how I can doubt that doctrine so holy comes from God.  He professes to review my book on the Soul; yet, apparently became he himself disbelieves the doctrine of the Holy Spirit taught alike in the Psalms and Prophets and in the New Testament,—­he cannot help forgetting that I profess to believe it.  He is not singular in his dulness.  That the sentiment above is necessarily independent of Biblical authority, see p. 133.]

[Footnote 2:  I do not here enlarge on this, as it is discussed in my treatise on The Soul 2nd edition, p. 76, or 3rd edition, p. 52.]

[Footnote 3:  1 Cor. xv. 3.  Compare Acts xii. 33, 34, 35 also Acts ii. 27, 34.]

[Footnote 4:  I need not except the potter and the thirty pieces of silver (Zech. xi. 13), for the potter is a mere absurd error of text or translation.  The Septuagint has the foundry, De Wette has the treasury, with whom Hitzig and Ewald agree.  So Winer (Simoni’s Lexicon).]

[Footnote 5:  Some of my critics are very angry with me for saying this; but Matthew himself (xxi. 4) almost says it:—­“All this was done, that it might be fulfilled,” &c.  Do my critics mean to tell me that Jesus was not aware of the prophecy? or if Jesus did know of the prophecy, will they tell me that he was not designing to fulfil it?  I feel such carping to be little short of hypocrisy.]