walk with the weight of the helpless child, the cruel
Babylonian ruffians riding at the side will snatch it from the
anguished bosom and dash its brains out against the rocks. Should we
be likely to forget that if we had ever formed part of such a
procession of prisoners of war? Hence when Psalm cxxxvii came to be
written by some poor suffering father who had lost maybe both wife and
child, he gave vent to his feelings in one of the most plaintive
patriotic songs ever sung:--

By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down--yea, we wept when we
remembered Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst
thereof, for there they that carried us away captive required of us a
song; and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one
of the songs of Zion. How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange
land? If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her
cunning.... O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed; happy
shall he be that rewardeth thee as thou hast served us. Happy shall he
be that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones!

One can feel deep sympathy with this unknown poet and his suffering
people without adopting the absurd view that this passage represents
God's word to our souls. It is a cry of suffering mingled with a
desire for vengeance, and that is all. But when a preacher declares
that he takes his stand and bases his gospel on the infallible Book, he
is either a fool or--a rhetorician.

+Belief in the infallible Book impossible.+--There are many good people
who maintain that they believe the Bible from cover to cover, and they
seem to think that this is something to be proud of. But they credit
themselves with an impossible feat; no one can believe contradictions,
in the sense of accepting them, whether intellectual or moral. The
very same people who will read with unction the most sanguinary
exhortations from scripture are usually people who themselves would not
hurt a fly. The Bible is not like a parliamentary blue book, an exact
and literal statement of facts; it represents for the most part what
earnest men belonging to a particular nationality in a bygone age
thought about life in relation to God. Many good people talk as though
the Bible were written by the finger of God Himself and let down from
heaven; on the other hand there are those who think that when they have
shown the inconsistencies of scripture, they have destroyed its valu