ion will disappear from
Christendom.

* * * * *

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 n