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On these grounds, as on others, the unreal Bible must be expected to pass away.  The Church at large never properly authenticated it.  The Bible nowhere calls for such a view of itself.  Scripture reveals to a critical study manifest tokens of its human fallibility, its thoroughly literary character.  We can trace the growth of this theory, and account for it naturally.  As a theory it cannot be stated reasonably.  It is a theory which is shown to be a superstition in the bibliolatries of other peoples.

Our bibliolatry is disappearing none too fast.  It has always wrought evil as well as good on civilization Like all other anachronisms, its original helpfulness to progress has now become a hindrance.  The day when it was of service is past for educated people, whose minds are open, and the evils it has caused flow from it still.

It has bred a superstitious use of the Bible which has always made mischief, though a mischief never realized as sensibly as now.  It has taught men to turn to these holy books and accept unquestioningly all therein recorded as authoritative on our thought and life.  It has barred all research which even seemed to contradict its history or science, and has held Europe in mental swaddling-bands, preventing normal growth.  It has taught Most Christian Kings to war with easy consciences, after the fashion of the Israelites in Canaan, and priests to sing solemn Te Deums over battle-fields where men lay weltering in one another’s blood.  It has given slave-owners the coveted proof that the peculiar system was a divine institution, and has founded the auction block for human cattle solidly upon the laws of God.  It has supplied Joseph Smith with a warrant for polygamy in the social usages of the Arab sheiks three thousand years ago.  It has opened a sacred refuge for every lie and wrong; no wildest form of which could fail to find some precedent within these Hebrew histories, which tell the story of a people’s upward growth from savagery.  It has furnished an arsenal stocked with proof texts, from which, through many generations, priests and doctors have armed themselves to war with one another; exhausting in ecclesiastical and theological strife the holy energies of Christian enthusiasm, which might else have changed the face of the earth.  It has arrayed faith against reason, by the necessity it has imposed of reconciling every new discovery with the cosmogony of Genesis, or the metaphysics of Romans; putting asunder those whom God hath joined together, in the needless conflict of science and religion.

It has driven away from the real revelation held in these sacred writings increasing numbers, in the growing generations; deafening their ears by its irrational clamor to the voice of the Living God which whispers in these pages, through the holy men who spake as they were moved of the Holy Ghost.  It has fathered the doubt which to-day sits, cheerless and chill, within the hearts and homes of thousands who once rejoiced in the warmth and light of God, but who now accept the alternative their teachers thrust upon them—­“all or none”—­and throw away the Blessed Book wherein God of old revealed Himself to them.