Twenty crimes and vices—lying, cheating, stealing, murder, wars of conquest, human sacrifices, cannibalism, witchcraft, slavery, polygamy, adultery, obscenity, intemperance, vagrancy ignorance, injustice to woman, unkindness to children, cruelty to animals, tyranny, persecution—are, we have seen, sanctioned by the Bible. Scattering this book broadcast over the land, making it the chief text-book of the Sunday-school and, above all, placing it in our public schools and compelling our youth to accept it as infallible authority, is a monstrous wrong; and you who advocate it are the enemies of virtue and the promoters of vice. James Anthony Froude says: “Considering all the heresies, the enormous crimes, the wickedness, the astounding follies, which the Bible has been made to justify, and which its indiscriminate reading has suggested; considering that it has been, indeed, the sword which our Lord said he was sending, and that not the devil himself could have invented an implement more potent to fill the hated world with lies and blood and fury, I think certainly that to send hawkers over the world loaded with copies of this book, scattering it in all places, among all persons, ... is the most culpable folly of which it is possible for man to be guilty.”

There are within the lids of this Bible a hundred chapters sanctioning the bloodiest deeds in all the annals of crime; and this is the book you wish to place in the hands of our sons! There are within the lids of this Bible a hundred chapters which no modest woman can read without her cheek becoming tinged with the blush of shame; and this is the book you wish to place in the hands of our daughters! If you delight to feast upon such carrion you have the right to do so, but you have no right to thrust it down the throats of your neighbors. As a Liberal, I concede to the Christian cuckoo the right to propagate her species; but I protest against her laying her eggs in the secular nest and having them hatched by the state.

I contend that the Bible does not present an infallible moral standard, and I have given many valid reasons why it does not. I expect the defenders of this book to complete the task that I have here essayed. They will claim that the Bible is opposed to crime. They will, no doubt, cite numerous passages in confirmation of this claim. Let them do this. Then place the results of our labors side by side. This will show that the Bible abounds with teachings that conflict. This fact established, the dogma of its divinity must fall. And this is what I am endeavoring to do—to tear this dogma from the human brain. Not until this is done can we have a pure morality. So long as men’s minds are confused and corrupted by these conflicting and demoralizing teachings, so long will immorality prevail. You cannot make men moral while they accept as their moral guide a book which sanctions every crime and presents as the best models of human excellence the most notorious villains. You cannot make them moral by teaching them that a lie is better for being called inspired, that a vice becomes a virtue with age, that a dead rogue should be canonized and a live one killed.

Not until this dogma is destroyed can you appreciate what is meritorious in the Bible. There are in it some noble precepts. It contains along with the false much that is true; along with the bad much that is good; but while you are compelled to accept all—the true and the false, the good and the bad, as alike infallible, as alike divine—it can be of no value to you.

You may contend that I mistake the meaning of what I have quoted from this book. But the language is too plain to be mistaken. Do not tell me that it states one thing and means another. This is, you affirm, the word of your God. Is your God wanting in candor?

So far as the Bible is concerned, the criminal has as much to support the justness of his crime as the Christian has to sustain the truthfulness of his creed. The various doctrines of the church are not upheld by stronger Scripture proofs than have been cited in justification of the crimes that I have named.

Bible apologists tell us that it is only in this book that wrongdoers confess and record their sins, and that this is evidence of its divinity. Were this true we might say that the Bible is the only book whose authors are so devoid of shame as to parade their sins. But this claim is not true. It was not the sinners who wrote these accounts of their sins any more than it is the criminals to-day who write and publish the accounts of their crimes.

Bible lands, we are told, are more moral than other lands. This is false. The morality of Pagan China and Japan, without the Bible, is not inferior to that of Christian Europe with it. Modern Europe with its partial rejection of the Bible is superior in morality to medieval Europe with its full acceptance of it. The morals of the people have improved in about the same ratio that their faith in the book has declined. A further declension of faith will bring a further improvement in morals. In Christian countries those who have discarded its teachings are morally superior to those who still accept them. It is the ignorant who are the most devout believers in this book, and it is the ignorant who are the most immoral. The intelligence and morality to be found in Christian lands are not the results of Bible teachings, but exist in spite of them.

That some great and good men have commended the Bible as a moral guide is true. These commendations are given wide publicity. But the testimonials of these men are, for the most part, not the result of careful reading and study. They have been inspired by the teachings of childhood, by the sentiment that prevails around them, or by a perusal of only the choicest portions of the book. These testimonials, too, are mostly from men who, while expressing admiration for many of its teachings, do not believe and do not profess to believe in its divinity. Many of these testimonials are forgeries.

“If you discard the Bible, what,” asks the Christian, “will you give us as a moral guide?” Enter a public library blindfolded; take from its shelves a volume at random, and you will scarcely select a worse one. The book you select may not pertain to morals. It may not even contain the word “moral.” But neither does the Bible. Must we go to the ignorant past for our morality? Does human experience count for nothing? Have the most marvelous advances been made in every other department of human knowledge during the past two thousand years and none in ethical science? Read Bentham, Mill, and Spencer. Let your children study Count Volney’s “Law of Nature,” and Miss Wixon’s “Right Living.” These books are not infallible and divine, they are fallible and human; but they are immeasurably superior to any books that supernaturalists can offer. Not in Moses nor Jesus, not in the Decalogue nor Sermon on the Mount, is there to be found a statement of moral duties so just and so comprehensive as the following from Volney:

“What do you conclude from all this? I conclude from it that all the social virtues are only the habitude of actions useful to society and to the individual who practices them; that they all refer to the physical object of man’s preservation; that nature having implanted in us the want of that preservation, has made a law to us of all its consequences, and a crime of everything that deviates from it; that we carry in us the seed of every virtue, and of every perfection; that it only requires to be developed that we are only happy inasmuch as we observe the rules established by nature for the end of our preservation; and that all wisdom, all perfection, all law, all virtue, all philosophy, consist in the practice of these axioms founded on our own organization:—Preserve thyself; Instruct thyself; Moderate thyself; live for thy fellow-men, that they may live for thee.”

The Bible moralist would have us believe that from this book all morality has been derived; that God is the author and the Bible the revelation and sole repository of moral laws. But it is not from Gods and Bibles that these laws have come. In the words of Tyndall, “Not in the way assumed by our dogmatic teachers has the morality of human nature been propped up. The power that has molded us thus far has worked with stern tools upon a rigid stuff.... That power did not work with delusions, nor will it stay its hands when such are removed. Facts, rather than dogmas, have been its ministers—hunger, shame, pride, love, hate, terror, awe—such were the forces, the interaction and adjustment of which during the immeasurable ages of his development wove the triplex web of man’s physical, intellectual, and moral nature, and such are the forces that will be effectual to the end.”

Accepting the Bible—not for what it is claimed to be, the word of God, but for what it is, the work of man—I can excuse, in a degree, the crude ideas of right and wrong and the laxity of morals that prevailed among the people whose history it purports to record. The age in which they lived, the circumstances that surrounded them, must palliate, to some extent, their deeds and theories. But it is humiliating to think that in these better times, illuminated by the light of a glorious civilization, there are those who spurn the robes of virtue that Reason in the loom of grave Experience has woven, and who from the dark and musty closets of the past drag forth for use the soiled and blood-stained garments that barbarians wore.

With this chapter our review of the Bible ends. We have examined successively the authenticity of its books, the credibility of its statements, and the morality of its teachings. The authenticity of the Bible must be abandoned. It will be abandoned, and abandoned soon. Its credibility, impaired by a knowledge of its lack of authenticity and the exposure of its numberless errors, will be contended for awhile longer. But this, in turn, will go. When its credibility has been destroyed, and it is acknowledged to be mostly a volume of fables and legends, priestcraft continuing to survive, the clergy, as a dernier resort, will descant upon the divine lessons of morality taught by these fables and legends. But the relentless iconoclasts of criticism will break this image also, and the Bible as a moral guide and religious authority will be laid away forever.