e Old Testament Canon, from which it
was long excluded because the name of God nowhere appears in it. The
historical events narrated in it are admitted to be of very doubtful
authenticity, as they are nowhere else mentioned in the Bible, and are
wholly unknown to secular history; and such events, if they occurred at
all, were of such transcendent importance to the Jewish nation, that
mention of them in the Chronicles, or by some of the prophets, could
hardly have been omitted. But our author gets around all these
difficulties by the Feast of Purim. He insists that such a memorial as
this, that has been and still is celebrated annually by the Jews in all
parts of the world, "since the memory of man runneth not to the
contrary," could not possibly have originated in a mere fiction, and
been perpetuated so long. Therefore, the Book of Esther must be true,
and divinely inspired!

When I had read thus far, in spite of my former simple faith in the
divine inspiration and infallible truth of the Bible, I found myself
clearly on the toboggan; and I was deeply disturbed in mind. I was
studying a thoroly orthodox author, a distinguished professor in one of
our leading colleges, whose book was approved by the bishops of my
church; a book clearly written for the purpose of defending the
traditional position of the church concerning the Bible, on almost
every page of which that I had thus far read, I found a series of
apologetics rather than arguments; with constant admissions of the
world's total ignorance of the origin, authorship and date of most of
the books of the Bible thus far reviewed. I began to wonder, if this
was what I was getting from such a source, inspired by such a motive,
what might I expect from a Biblical scholar and critic who was in
search only of abstract truth, with no preconceived opinions to support
or defend? I felt an incipient revolution brewing in my mind. But I
was yet to learn more.

Concerning the poetical books, I found that the Book of Job was not
written by Job; that nobody knows who wrote it, nor when nor where. I
found that conjecture by different scholars placed it all the way from
"before Moses" to after the exile. Nobody knows whether it purports to
record, in poetic form, a series of actual historic facts and events;
or whether it is merely a dramatic allegory, entirely fictitious, or
founded upon some substratum of fact. We do not know who Job was,
whether a Hebrew, an Arab, or