the late
Dean Farrar.

To quote again from Dr. Gladden:

Evidently neither the theory of verbal inspiration, nor the
theory of plenary inspiration, can be made to fit the facts
which a careful study of the writings themselves brings before
us. _These writings are not inspired in the sense which we
have commonly given to that word._ The verbal theory of
inspiration was only tenable while they were supposed to be
the work of a single author. _To such a composite literature
no such theory will apply._

The Bible is not inspired. The fact is that _no_ "sacred" book is
inspired. _All_ "sacred" books are the work of human minds. All ideas of
God are human ideas. All religions are made by man.

When the old-fashioned Christian said the Bible was an inspired book, he
meant that God put the words and the facts directly into the mind of
the prophet. That meant that God told Moses about the creation, Adam and
Eve, Cain and Abel, Noah and the Ark, and the Ten Commandments.

Many modern Christians, amongst whom I place the Rev. Ambrose Pope, of
Bakewell, believe that God gave Moses (and all the other prophets) a
special genius and a special desire to convey religious information to
other men.

And Mr. Pope suggests that man was so ignorant, so childlike, or so
weak in those days that it was necessary to disguise plain facts in
misleading symbols.

But the man, Moses or another, who wrote the Book of Genesis was a man
of literary genius. He was no child, no weakling. If God had said to
him: "I made the world out of the fiery nebula, and I made the sea
to bring forth the staple of life, and I caused all living things to
develop from that seed or staple of life, and I drew man out from the
brutes; and the time was six hundred millions of years"--if God had said
that to Moses, do you think Moses would not have understood?

Now, let me show you what the Christian asks us to believe. He asks us
to believe that the God who was the first cause of creation, and knew
everything, inspired man, in the childhood of the world, with a fabulous
and inaccurate theory of the origin of man and the earth, and that since
that day the same God has gradually changed or added to the inspiration,
until He inspired Laplace, and Galileo, and Copernicus, and Darwin to
contradict the teachings of the previous fifty thousand years. He asks
us to believe that God muddled men's minds with a mysterious series
of