ly book much
read, until of late, by the mass of men; the one foreign and ancient
literature familiar alike to the plain people in Germany and France, in
England and America; the common well-spring of inspiration to thought and
imagination, to character and conduct.

It is the Magna Charta of our liberties; the revered companion and master
of the Pilgrims who sailed the wintry seas, and, on Plymouth Rock,
building wiser than they knew, founded a nation covenanting freedom of
conscience unto all men; a nation on whose Bell of Independence runs the
Bible legend, "Proclaim liberty to the inhabitants thereof."

Wherever society is found to-day in travail with a new and higher order,
the conception can be traced to the seminal words of the Bible. The
institutions and manners of progressive civilization are what they are
because in the heart of that civilization has lain the Bible.

My brothers, were these books nothing more to us than such ancient
writings, the literature of so noble a race, a literature intrinsically
fine, to which our civilization owes so much of mental and of moral
influence, they should win our reverence, and should shame the wantonness
of liberalism, falsely so called.

What if in these ancient writings there are ancient errors, the marvels
which a child age exaggerated into miracles, stories of savage cruelty and
brutal lust in rude, rough times, acts of superstition dark and dreadful,
utterances which to us are blasphemous ascribed to the Eternal and Holy
One? Such faults are inevitable in the literature that records a nation's
growth from barbarism. Were a man in the name of Liberty or in the name of
Truth to hunt through Homer, to rake together all the errors and
superstitions embalmed in these immortal sagas, to haul up from the
obscurity where sensible people leave them the lewdnesses suggested or
described, and then to fling these blemishes at the book in which the
children of Greece and England and America have read with tingling blood
the tales which stirred their souls, by what name would we call him? By
that name let him stand forth impaled upon the scorn of an age that has
not lost the grace of reverence, who, mindless of majestic age, the
dignity of letters, an influence unrivalled and benign, associations
tender and most holy, upon these venerable and sacred books spits his
shallow scepticism, spumes his spleenful sarcasm, and smuts them with his
own sensuality.

Let Irreverence stay