any of
these voices, but asking that other voices also may help us to the
truth.

The preacher's message is a book called the Bible. That is only the
literary form of his message--telling its history. Even that form,
which is much less divine as paper and ink are less lofty in the
scale than humanity, has worked wonders. To-day, the Bible offers the
nineteenth-century infidel as testimony of the influence it has. It
has force enough to make infidelity preach tearfully and well about
man, woman, and child. Skepticism did not do so well until the Bible
came. The Bible has furnished the eloquence of infidelity with such
a man as Shakespeare to talk about; no student of literature could
imagine Shakespeare without the Bible and the Bible's influence upon
him as he created his dreams. It furnished an Abraham Lincoln for an
orator to compare favorably with incomplete ideas of Almighty God; but
it seems to have been unable to show the critic that Christian ideas
of Almighty God made Lincoln so love the Lord's Prayer that he wanted
a church builded with this as its creed. It would seem that any
general denunciation or humorous caricature of a book which has
worked such an amazing effect in literature as has the Bible would
be tempered by some recognition of the fact that these other
minds--poets, orators, sages, and scientists--have found illumination
and help in its pages. Liberal Christianity will be intellectually
broad. Certainly the greatest of modern pagans, Goethe, will not be
accused of favoritism toward the Bible, yet he said: "I esteem the
gospels to be thoroughly genuine, for there shines forth from them the
reflected splendor of a sublimity, proceeding from the person of
Jesus Christ, of so divine a kind as only the divine could ever have
manifested upon earth." The Earl of Rochester saw that the only
liberalism which objects to the Bible, in its true uses, is the
liberalism of licentiousness; and he left this saying: "A bad heart
is the great argument against this holy book." And Faraday, weeping,
said: "Why will people go astray when they have this blest book to
guide them?"

If we turn to literature we encounter many such liberal thinkers as
Theodore Parker, who calmly informs us: "This collection of books has
taken such a hold upon the world as has no other. The literature of
Greece, which goes up like incense from that land of temples and
heroic deeds, has not half the influence of this book. It goes equally