ms continued cannot be known to-day; the time
of their abandonment has perished from the recollection of any one now
living.

It would seem to have been the Bible-reading that wrought the change.
The prayer and the blessing were to him sincere and gracious; but as the
readings continued he realized that he had never before considered the
Bible from a doctrinal point of view, as a guide to spiritual salvation.
To his logical reasoning mind, a large portion of it seemed absurd:
a mass of fables and traditions, mere mythology. From such material
humanity had built its mightiest edifice of hope, the doctrines of its
faith. After a little while he could stand it no longer.

"Livy," he said one day, "you may keep this up if you want to, but I
must ask you to excuse me from it. It is making me a hypocrite. I don't
believe in this Bible. It contradicts my reason. I can't sit here and
listen to it, letting you believe that I regard it, as you do, in the
light of gospel, the word of God."

He was moved to write an article on the human idea of God, ancient and
modern. It contained these paragraphs:

The difference in importance, between the God of the Bible and the
God of the present day, cannot be described, it can only be vaguely
and inadequately figured to the mind.... If you make figures
to represent the earth and moon, and allow a space of one inch
between them, to represent the four hundred thousand miles of
distance which lies between the two bodies, the map will have to be
eleven miles long in order to bring in the nearest fixed star.
--[His figures were far too small. A map drawn on the scale of
400,000 miles to the inch would need to be 1,100 miles long to take
in both the earth and the nearest fixed star. On such a map the
earth would be one-fiftieth of an inch in diameter--the size of a
small grain of sand.]--So one cannot put the modern heavens on a
map, nor the modern God; but the Bible God and the Bible heavens can
be set down on a slate and yet not be discommoded....

The difference between that universe and the modern one revealed by
science is as the difference between a dust-flecked ray in a barn
and the sublime arch of the Milky Way in the skies. Its God was
strictly proportioned to its dimensions. His sole solicitude was
about a handful of truculent nomads. He worried and fretted over
them in a peculiarly and distractingly hum