which has done incalculable harm to
men. The spiritual truth became an intellectual lie, and in every Catholic
country superstition has eaten out faith, and reason refuses to reverence
the sacrament.

The Bible has repeated this common story. The spiritual influence felt
forth-flowing from it, the voice of God heard speaking through it, drew
man's natural reverence to it. In trying to express the reasons for this
reverence he has over-stated and mis-stated the nature of these books.
The symbol has been identified with the reality. The Bible has become an
idol, a fetish.

Bibliolatry, the worship of the Bible, is responsible for the lack of the
reasonable reverence these sacred writings merit. This reasonable
reverence can be recovered only by frankly putting away the unreasonable
reverence. We must exorcise a superstition to save a faith. We must part
with the unreal Bible if we would hold the real Bible. Iconoclasm is not
pleasant to any but the callow youth. It may be none the less needful; and
then the sober man must not shrink from shivering the most sacred shrine.

As runs the Hindu thought, the Destroyer is one of the forms of the Divine
Power. God is continually destroying worlds and creeds alike; but in order
to rebuild.

"Whose voice then shook the earth: but now he hath promised, saying,
yet once more I shake not the earth only, but also heaven. And this
word, Yet once more, signifieth the removing of those things that are
shaken, as of things that have been made, that those things which
cannot be shaken may remain."

According to its root-meaning, "learning" is a "shaking." Every new
learning shakes society, now as in the days past. As the writer of the
Epistle to the Hebrews saw, it is God who is shaking society in every such
new learning, to the end that "those things which cannot be shaken may
remain." Man need not fear to follow in the steps of God.

There is danger now in shaking men's faiths. There is danger, too, in
leaving men's faith unshaken--unless the Divine process of progress is
wrong. In the stress and storm of the tossing sea, Faith may go down in
the waters. It may also die of dry rot by the old wharves. There is danger
in rash utterance, but there is at least equal danger in timid silence.
The time never comes when a reconstruction does not imperil some great
interest. None the less the reconstruction must go on. Delay in pulling
down may make building up of the old str