earless honesty and clear common sense with which
he would consider the Bibles of the Mohammedan, or Buddhist, or Hindoo,
and then ask himself the question: "Is the Bible a holy and inspired
book, and the word of God to man, or is it an incongruous and
contradictory collection of tribal traditions and ancient fables,
written by men of genius and imagination?"

THE EVOLUTION OF THE BIBLE

We now reach the second stage in our examination, which is the claim
that no religion known to man can be truly said to be original. All
religions, the Christian religion included, are adaptations or variants
of older religions. Religions are not _revealed_: they are _evolved_.

If a religion were revealed by God, that religion would be perfect in
whole and in part, and would be as perfect at the first moment of its
revelation as after ten thousand years of practice. There has never been
a religion which fulfils those conditions.

According to Bible chronology, Adam was created some six thousand years
ago. Science teaches that man existed during the glacial epoch, which
was at least fifty thousand years before the Christian era.

Here I recommend the study of Laing's _Human Origins_, Parson's _Our
Sun God_, Sayce's _Ancient Empires of the East_, and Frazer's _Golden
Bough_.

In his visitation charge at Blackburn, in July, 1889, the Bishop of
Manchester spoke as follows:

Now, if these dates are accepted, to what age of the world shall
we assign that Accadian civilisation and literature which so long
preceded Sargo I. and the statutes of Sirgullah? I can best
answer you in the words of the great Assyriologist, F. Hommel:
"If," he says, "the Semites were already settled in Northern
Babylonia (Accad) in the beginning of the fourth thousand B.C.
in possession of the fully developed Shumiro-Accadian culture
adopted by them--a culture, moreover, which appears to have
sprouted like a cutting from Shumir, then the latter must be far,
far older still, and have existed in its _completed_ form in the
fifth thousand B.C., an age to which I unhesitatingly ascribe the
South Babylonian incantations."... Who does not see that such
facts as these compel us to remodel our whole idea of the past?

A culture which was _complete_ one thousand years before Adam must have
needed many thousands of years to develop. It would be a modest guess
that Accadian culture implied a growt