interspace of a thousand years. They represent the fragmentary
survival of Hebrew literature. They stand on very different
levels of value, and even of morality. Read for centuries in
an otiose, perfunctory, slavish, and superstitious manner, they
have often been so egregiously misunderstood that many entire
systems of interpretation--which were believed in for generations,
and which fill many folios, now consigned to a happy oblivion--
are clearly proved to have been utterly baseless. Colossal
usurpations of deadly import to the human race have been built,
like inverted pyramids, on the narrow apex of a single
misinterpreted text.

Compare those utterances of the freethinker and the divine, and then
read the following words of Dean Farrar:

The manner in which the Higher Criticism has slowly and surely
made its victorious progress, in spite of the most determined
and exacerbated opposition, is a strong argument in its favour.
It is exactly analogous to the way in which the truths of
astronomy and of geology have triumphed over universal
opposition. They were once anathematised as "infidel"; they
are now accepted as axiomatic. I cannot name a single student
or professor of any eminence in Great Britain who does not
accept, with more or less modification, the main conclusions
of the German school of critics.

This being the case, I ask, as a mere layman, what right has the Bible
to usurp the title of "the word of God"? What evidence can be sharked up
to show that it is any more a holy or an inspired book than any book of
Thomas Carlyle's, or John Ruskin's, or William Morris'? What evidence
is forthcoming that the Bible is true?

THE UNIVERSE ACCORDING TO ANCIENT RELIGION AND MODERN SCIENCE

The theory of the early Christian Church was that the Earth was flat,
like a plate, and the sky was a solid dome above it, like an inverted
blue basin.

The Sun revolved round the Earth to give light by day, the Moon revolved
round the Earth to give light by night. The stars were auxiliary lights,
and had all been specially, and at the same time, created for the good
of man.

God created the Sun, Moon, Stars, and Earth in six days. He created them
by word, and He created them out of nothing.

The centre of the Universe was the Earth. The Sun was made to give light
to the Earth by day, and the Moon to give light