buked for his zeal by
the gracious Master. It is part of the human weakness through which the
voice of God speaks, taking its tone from the defects of the instrument.
This imprecation had reference, in all probability, solely to the
copyists, against whose carelessness the author sought to guard himself by
an awful threat. It certainly had reference to this book alone. Not until
long afterwards did the Church determine what books were to enter the
canon of the New Testament, and in what order they were to stand. That
order placed the Revelation as the last book in the canon, and thus made
this threat appear to cover the whole Bible.[26]

II.

_It is a wrong use of the Bible to accept its utterances indiscriminately
as the words of God, to quote every saying of every speaker in its pages,
or every deed of every actor in its histories as expressing to us the mind
of God._

Such use of the Bible is thoughtlessly common. Some time ago before going
into a church in whose service I was asked to participate, I ventured to
show some slight hesitancy in using certain Psalms which were set down in
the Psalter for the day. When asked, why, I mildly answered that I could
not request a Christian congregation to join with me in singing, after the
embittered Jews in Babylon:

Remember, O Lord, the children of Edom, in the day of Jerusalem. How
they said, "Down with It! down with it! even to the ground." Oh,
daughter of Babylon, who art to be wasted, Happy shall he be that
rewardeth thee as thou hast served us. Happy shall he be that taketh
thy little ones and throweth them against the stones.

Nor could I ask the people to unite in praying:

Make their nobles like Oreb and Zeeb; yea, all their princes as Zeba
and Salmana.

I had in mind the fate of Oreb and Zeeb and of Zeba and Salmana,
splendidly brave fellows even in their death, as told in the seventh and
eighth chapters of Judges, where you can learn what sort of prayer was
this of those savage Jews. Naturally, as I thought, I objected to voicing
such heathen imprecations in the nineteenth century of the era of the
Prince of Peace. My good friend, with a look of amazement, replied, "Why,
these Psalms are in the Bible." That ended the question for him.

This incident is typical of a vast quantity of wrong uses of the Bible.
Thus our American slaveholder read that 'precious' word of the ancient
tradition, "Cursed be Ham," and smoothed his trou