also.  Thus the extermination of the Canaanites, for which the Hebrews pleaded long after the Divine order, and for which they had substantial warrant in Destiny’s determination to rid the land of these corrupting tribes and make room for the noble life Israel was to develop, has been the stock argument of kings and soldiers for their bloody trade.  Thus poor human consciences have been sorely hurt and troubled as men have read, in stories such as those of Jael and Sisera and Jacob and Esau, of acts which their better nature instinctively condemned.  They have felt themselves arraigning the Bible and suspecting God.

If indeed the Bible is a book let down from the skies, of which God can be called the ‘author,’ then all such uses of it may be correct enough, and in those dark and savage words and deeds I may be obliged to find the words of God and the deeds He holds up to our admiration and imitation; though I do not see that such a use is a necessity, even on this theory.  Fancy a man quoting Shylock when he pleads for his bond, or Iago’s devilish innuendos against Desdemona’s purity, as showing what Shakespeare liked or what he would have us imitate!  “These are the words of Shakespeare!” Yes, but of Shakespeare’s Shylock, Shakespeare’s Iago.

If, however, the Old Testament is the national library of the Jews, I must expect to find all sorts of early Jewish notions, in ethics and religion, bodied in the words of the speakers they introduce, and the deeds of the men of whom they tell the tales.

If the Bible is the record of a real revelation which came in the spirits of ancient men, through the historic growth of conscience and reason; and if these books are the literature embalming that growth of a people out of ignorance and superstition into the light of pure ethics and spiritual religion; then I must look to find all sorts of crudities and crassnesses in the representation of God, and all phases of unmoral and immoral life, as parts of the error and imperfection out of which they were educated.  These deeds and words are the milestones in the path of progress by which Judaism reached Christianity.  If the individual is to reproduce the story of the race, as our wise men tell us, then these words and deeds are in the Bible to carry us through the same course of education; to exercise our consciences in discriminating right from wrong, and to lead us to grow out of such conceptions and desires toward the spirit of Christ.  In a cruise last summer we dropped anchor in a lovely little out-of-the-way harbor of Buzzard’s Bay, which proved to be near Pocasset; where, not long ago, a pious man, reading the Hebrew tradition of Abraham and Isaac, as a real command of the Most High, and having this word of the Lord borne in on his mind, as spoken to himself, murdered his child in sacrifice to God—­no angel interfering to stay his knife.  He simply made a reductio ad absurdum of this use of the Bible.[27]