ead of being its source and
authority. Thus the literature of the Jewish race and the early
Christians _grew_. In course of time the thirty-nine books containing
our present Old Testament were brought together in one collection. We
do not know just when. Afterwards the twenty-seven books of our New
Testament were collected in the same way. Age and tradition first
embalmed them in an air of sanctity; and then superstition made of them
a fetish. Until this "spell" is broken there can be no hope of
anything like unity in the religious world. Until this fetish of a
"once for all divine and infallible revelation, completed and handed
down from heaven" is abandoned, there will continue to be "diversities
of interpretation," and consequently divisions, controversies,
bickerings, persecutions and recriminations will continue among
mankind, and wars will continue among nations.

It may be said here that all the other sacred literature of the world,
the Bibles of other systems of religion, the Zend Avesta, the Vedas,
the Upanishads, the Koran, and others, had their origin in exactly the
same source and manner as did our Bible; and attained sanctity and
authority among their respective followers in exactly the same way.
But we need not go into it in detail.

But when we return to our first proposition, that all religion in its
origin, fundamental essence and ultimate purpose is not only one and
the same, but is _natural_ and common to all humanity; that its
processes are a continual revelation in nature and human experience in
man's continuous progress onward and upward in the scale of human
attainment; and that the Bible, and all other literature of its kind,
merely records a part of these processes and revelations in nature and
experience, by which we are able to read the footprints of human
progress in the past, and that these various writers, mostly unknown,
merely recorded what they saw, felt, believed or understood at that
time to be the truth; then all these difficulties of interpretation and
sources of division vanish, and these books take on a new value and
importance that they never otherwise attain.

With this view of its origin and purpose the Bible readily takes and
holds its place as the most remarkable and invaluable book the world
has ever known, or perhaps ever will know. It becomes at once an
inexhaustible treasure-house of knowledge indispensable to the world's
highest thought and progress,--knowledge