I refuse to accept the Bible as a moral guide because it sanctions adultery and prostitution.

Adultery is made prominent by the recital of the numerous adulteries of Abraham, Lot, Jacob, Judah, Samson, David, and other Bible saints, and sanctified by the approved adulteries of Abraham and Jacob.

Both Abraham and Isaac were willing to sell the virtue of their wives to save themselves from harm.

Two instances are recorded of fathers having offered their own daughters to gratify the lust of a sensual mob, and these abominable acts are represented as especially meritorious. Read the nineteenth chapter of Genesis and the nineteenth chapter of Judges; dwell upon the eighth verse of the former and the twenty-fourth verse of the latter; and then, if you can indorse the spirit of these narratives, you are unfit to be the parent of a daughter.

The Mosaic law authorizes a father to sell his daughter for a concubine or mistress (euphemistically translated “maid servant”). God’s instructions respecting the thirty-two thousand captive Midianite maidens impliedly sanction concubinage and prostitution.

These Bible teachings have been the cause of countless outrages against the chastity of woman. John Wesley says:

“Almost all the soldiers in the Christian world ... have claimed, more especially in time of war, another kind of liberty: that of borrowing the wives and daughters of the men that fell into their hands” (Wesley’s Miscellaneous Works, Vol. III., p. 117).

Luther, drawing his morality from the Bible, gave concubinage his indorsement:

“There is nothing unusual in princes keeping concubines; and although the lower orders may not perceive the excuses of the thing, the more intelligent know how to make allowance” (Consilium).

Luther might with equal truthfulness have said, “There is nothing unusual in priests and preachers keeping concubines,” and he might have helped to confirm it by a few leaves from his own private history. In a letter to his confidential friend, Spalatin, he confessed to numerous adulteries.

God instructs his prophet Hosea to marry a prostitute. He subsequently commands him to love and hire an adulteress (Hosea i, 2, 3; iii, 1, 2).

Christ forgave the woman taken in adultery, while his favorite female companion was a reformed (?) prostitute. Referring to his female ancestors, Dr. Alexander Walker, a Christian, says:

“It is remarkable that in the genealogy of Christ only four women have been named: Tamar, who seduced the father of her late husband; Rachab, a common prostitute; Ruth, who, instead of marrying one of her cousins, went to bed with another of them, and Bathsheba, an adultress, who espoused David, the murderer of her husband” (Woman, p. 330).

The early Christians were notorious for their adulteries. Dr. Cave, in his “Primitive Christianity” (Part II., ch. v), says it was commonly charged “that the Christians knew one another by certain privy marks and signs, and were wont to be in love almost before they knew one another; that they exercised lust and filthiness under a pretense of religion, promiscuously calling themselves brothers and sisters, that by the help of so sacred a name their common adulteries might become incestuous.”

Of the Carpocratians, who Dr. Lardner says “are not accused of rejecting any part of the New Testament,” Dr. Cave says: “Both men and women used to meet at supper (which was called their love-feast), when after they had loaded themselves with a plentiful meal, to prevent all shame, if they had any remaining, they put out the lights, and then promiscuously mixed in filthiness with one another” (Ibid).

In his Epistle to the Corinthians, Paul says: “It is reported commonly that there is fornication among you, and such fornication as is not so much as named among the gentiles” (1 Cor. v, 1).

It is an indisputable fact that the most notorious adulterers are those whose profession makes them most familiar with the teachings of the Bible, and compels them to accept its teachings as divine.

I refuse to accept the Bible as a moral guide, and protest against its being placed in the hands of the young, because its pages are defiled with obscenity.

Aside from thousands of coarse and vulgar expressions contained in it, there are at least a hundred passages so obscene that their appearance in any other book would exclude that book from the mails and send its publisher to prison. The United States courts have declared parts of the Bible to be obscene. There are entire chapters, such as the thirty-eighth chapter of Genesis, that reek with obscenity from beginning to end.

In proof of the charge of obscenity, I refer you to the following: Isaiah xxxvi, 12; Ezek. iv, 12–15; Gen. xix, 30–36; xxx, 1–16; xxxviii; 2 Kings xviii, 27; Lev. xv, 16–33; Job xl, 16, 17; 1 Kings xiv, 10; Isaiah iii, 17.

That portions of the Bible are obscene and unfit to be read, is admitted even by Christians. Noah Webster, a Protestant, edited an expurgated edition of the Bible. In vindication of his work, he says:

“Many passages are expressed in language which decency forbids to be repeated in families and in the pulpit.”

The Rev. Dr. Embree, Methodist, of Kansas, in a speech before the Topeka School Board advocating the reading of Bible selections in the public schools of that city, recently said:

“I would not want the Bible read indiscriminately. I think some of it unfit to be read by any one.”

The Rev. Father Maguire, Catholic, in his debate with the Rev. Mr. Greg, at Dublin, gave utterance to the following:

“I beg of you not to continue such a practice; it is disreputable. I will ask Mr. Greg a question (and I beg of you, my brethren of the Protestant church, to bear this in mind), I will ask him if he dare to take up the Bible and read from the book of Genesis the fact of Onan—I ask him will he read that? Will he read the fact relative to Lot and his two daughters? Will he read these and many other passages which I could point out to him in the Holy Bible, which I would not take one thousand guineas, nay, all the money in the world, and read them here to-day?”

Richard Lalor Shiel, M. P., and Privy Counselor to the Queen, thus wrote:

“Part of the Holy Writings consist of history, and the narration of facts of a kind that cannot be mentioned in the presence of a virtuous woman without exciting horror. Shall a woman be permitted to read in her chamber what she would tremble to hear at her domestic board? Shall she con over and revolve what she would rather die than utter?”

And if unfit for the perusal of a matured woman, shall innocent childhood be polluted by these vile, indecent tales?