My suggestion of an expurgated Bible, on which so many hard criticisms have been passed, seemed to me innocent enough, since most sensible people have been in the habit of expurgating the Bible for themselves in home readings and in the readings in the churches.  This is what Plato thought of such stories in the sacred book of the Grecians: 

“Whatever beautiful fable they may invent, we should select, and what is not so, we should reject:  and we are to prevail on nurses and mothers to repeat to the children such fables as are selected, and fashion their minds by fables * * * For though these things were true, yet I think they should not be so readily told to the unwise and the young, but rather concealed from them.  As little ought we to describe in fables, the battles of the giants and other many and various feuds, both of gods and heroes, with their own kindred and relatives; but if we would persuade them that never at all should one citizen hate another, and that it is not holy, such things as these are rather to be told them in early childhood; and the poets should be obliged to compose consistently with these views * * * Young persons are not able to judge what is allegory and what is not, but whatever opinions they receive at such an age are wont to be obliterated with difficulty, and immovable.  Hence one would think, we should of all things endeavor, that what they should first hear be composed in the best manner for exciting them to virtue.”

“Republic,” Book II.

[27] How then are we to know what words and deeds express the mind of God, are words of the Lord, examples He presents for our imitation?  By the mind of God manifest in ‘the express image of His person?’ All morality and religion is to be tried by ‘the mind which was in Christ,’ ’the spirit of Christ which dwelleth in us.’

[28] In what is said above there la no positive denial intended of the Old Testament miracles.  We are in no position to deny them.  The point is simply that they are not bounden on us in any reasonable and reverent recognition of a real historical revelation in the Old Testament, and need trouble no one who cannot receive them.  The miracles of Christ, when reduced to the wonders reported by the conjoint testimony of the synoptics,—­i.e., to the common tradition of the early church, stand apart from all other Scripture miracles; having a reasonable and natural character as the powers of such a personality, and coming within the ken of our visions of possibility.  They are imaged In the well attested powers of rare men.  They appear as in no wise violations of law, but as the manifestations of nature’s laws and forces worked by the normal man, having ‘dominion’ over the earth.  “The wise soul expels disease.”

[29] So judicious a commentator as Dean Alford, in his introduction to the Second Epistle to the Thessalonians, discussing the vexed question of the Daniel-like section in the third chapter, so wholly unlike Paul observes: