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]

III.

_It is a wrong use of the Bible to accept everything recorded therein as
necessarily true._

If the historians were simply the amanuenses of the Infinite Spirit, then
of course they could not have erred in anything they recorded. If they
were ordinary writers, trying to tell the story of their peoples' growth;
searching court archives, state annals, old parchments of forgotten
writers, consulting the traditions of town and village, using their
material in the best way their abilities enabled them to do; using all to
teach virtue and religion, for which alone they were specially qualified
of God; then all questions of historical accuracy are beside the mark.
Nothing in their inspiration guarantees their historical accuracy; their
philological learning in using ancient poetic language, or their critical
judgment in detecting exaggerations. Are we to wait anxiously upon the
latest Assyrian tablets or the freshest Egyptian mummy to confirm our
faith that God has spoken to the spirit of man? Are we to quake in our
shoes when a few ciphers are cut off from the roll of Israel's impossible
armies? If much that we read as literal history turns out legend and myth,
are we to find a painful alternative between a blind credulity and as
blind a skepticism? We follow this same re-reading of Roman and Grecian
story untroubled, and see the heroes of our childhood turn into races and
sun-myths without calling the Muse of History a fraud.

Has it been such comfort to us to read the doings of Samson as actual
history, slaying a thousand men with the jawbone of an ass, tying
fire-brands to the tails of three hundred foxes, etc., that we should
resent the translation of this impossible hero into the Semiti