Chapter II: Part 2

The immense majority of scholars of name and acknowledged
competence in England and Europe have now been led to form
an irresistible conclusion that the Book of Daniel was not
written, and could not have been written, in its present form,
by the prophet Daniel, B.C. 534, but that it can only have been
written, as we now have it, in the days of Antiochus Epiphanes,
about B.C. 164, and that the object of the pious and patriotic
author as to inspirit his desponding countrymen by splendid
specimens of that lofty moral fiction which was always common
amongst the Jews after the Exile, and was known as "The Haggadah."
So clearly is this proven to most critics, that they willingly
suffer the attempted refutations of their views to sink to
the ground under the weight of their own inadequacy.
(_The Bible and the Child_.)

I return now to Dr. Aked, from whose book I quote the following:

Dr. Clifford has declared that there is not a man who has
given a day's attention to the question who holds the complete
freedom of the Bible from inaccuracy. He has added that "it
is become more and more impossible to affirm the inerrancy
of the Bible." Dr. Lyman Abbott says that "an infallible book
is an impossible conception, and to-day no one really believes
that our present Bible is such a book."

Compare those opinions with the following extract from the first article in _The Bible and the Child_:

The change of view respecting the Bible, which has marked the
advancing knowledge and more earnest studies of this generation
is only the culmination of the discovery that there were
different documents in the Book of Genesis--a discovery first
published by the physician, Jean Astruc, in 1753. There are
_three_ widely divergent ways of dealing with these results of
profound study, each of which is almost equally dangerous to
the faith of the rising generation.

1. Parents and teachers may go on inculcating dogmas about the
Bible and methods of dealing with it which have long become
impossible to those who have really tried to follow the manifold
discoveries of modern inquiry with perfectly open and unbiased
minds. There are a certain number of persons who, when their
minds have become stereotyped in foregone conclusions, are simply
_incapable_ of grasping new truths. They become obstructives,
and not infrequently bigoted obstructives. As convinced as the
Pope of their own personal infallibility, their attitude towards
those who see that the old views are no longer tenable is an
attitude of anger and alarm. This is the usual temper of the
_odium theologicum_. It would, if it could, grasp the thumbscrew
and the rack of mediaeval Inquisitors, and would, in the last
resource, hand over all opponents to the scaffold or the stake.
Those whose intellects have thus been petrified by custom and
advancing years are, of all others, the most hopeless to deal
with. They have made themselves incapable of fair and rational
examination of the truths which they impugn. They think that
they can, by mere assertion, overthrow results arrived at by the
lifelong inquiries of the ablest students, while they have not
given a day's serious or impartial study to them. They fancy
that even the ignorant, if only they be what is called "orthodox,"
are justified in strong denunciation of men quite as truthful,
and often incomparably more able, than themselves. Off-hand
dogmatists of this stamp, who usually abound among professional
religionists, think that they can refute any number of scholars,
however profound and however pious, if only they shout "Infidel"
with sufficient loudness.

Those are not the words of an "Infidel." They are the words of 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 revelations cloaked in fable and allegory; that He allowed them to stumble and to blunder, and to quarrel over these "revelations"; that He allowed them to persecute, and slay, and torture each other on account of divergent readings of his "revelations" for ages and ages; and that He is still looking on while a number of bewildered and antagonistic religions fight each other to achieve the survival of the fittest. Is that a reasonable theory? Is it the kind of theory a reasonable man can accept? Is it consonant with common sense?

Contrast that with our theory. We say that early man, having no knowledge of science, and more imagination than reason, would be alarmed and puzzled by the phenomena of Nature. He would be afraid of the dark, he would be afraid of the thunder, he would wonder at the moon, at the stars, at fire, at the ocean. He would fear what he did not understand, and he would bow down and pay homage to what he feared.

Then, by degrees, he would personify the stars, and the sun, and the thunder, and the fire. He would make gods of these things. He would make gods of the dead. He would make gods of heroes. He would do what all savage races do, what all children do: he would make legends, or fables, or fairy tales out of his hopes, his fears, and his guesses.

Does not that sound reasonable? Does not history teach us that it is true? Do we not know that religion was so born and nursed?

There is no such thing known to men as an original religion. All religions are made up of the fables and the imaginations of tribes long since extinct. Religion is an evolution, not a revelation. It has been invented, altered, and built up, and pulled down, and reconstructed time after time. It is a conglomeration and an adaptation, as language is. And the Christian religion is no more an original religion than English is an original tongue. We have Sanscrit, Latin, Greek, French, Saxon, Norman words in our language; and we have Aryan, Semitic, Egyptian, Roman, Greek, and all manner of ancient foreign fables, myths, and rites in our Christian religion.

We say that Genesis was a poetic presentation of a fabulous story pieced together from many traditions of many tribes, and recording with great literary power the ideas of a people whose scientific knowledge was very incomplete.

Now, I ask you which of these theories is the most reasonable; which is the most scientific; which agrees most closely with the facts of philology and history of which we are in possession?

Why twist the self-evident fact that the Bible story of creation was the work of unscientific men of strong imagination into a far-fetched and unsatisfactory puzzle of symbol and allegory? It would be just as easy and just as reasonable to take the _Morte d'Arthur_ and try to prove that it contained a veiled revelation of God's relations to man.

And let me ask one or two questions as to this matter of the revelation of the Holy Bible. Is God all-powerful or is he not? If he is all-powerful, why did He make man so imperfect? Could He not have created him at once a wise and good creature? Even when man was ignorant and savage, could not an all-powerful God have devised some means of revealing Himself so as to be understood? If God really wished to reveal Himself to man, why did He reveal Himself only to one or two obscure tribes, and leave the rest of mankind in darkness?

Those poor savages were full of credulity, full of terror, full of wonder, full of the desire to worship. They worshipped the sun and the moon; they worshipped ghosts and demons; they worshipped tyrants, and pretenders, and heroes, dead and alive. Do you believe that if God had come down on earth, with a cohort of shining angels, and had said, "Behold, I am the only God," these savages would not have left all baser gods and worshipped Him? Why, these men, and all the thousands of generations of their children, have been looking for God since first they learned to look at sea and sky. They are looking for Him now. They have fought countless bloody wars and have committed countless horrible atrocities in their zeal for Him. And you ask us to believe that His grand revelation of Himself is bound up in a volume of fables and errors collected thousands of years ago by superstitious priests and prophets of Palestine, and Egypt, and Assyria.

We cannot believe such a statement. No man can believe it who tests it by his reason in the same way in which he would test any modern problem. If the leaders of religion brought the same vigour and subtlety of mind to bear upon religion which they bring to bear upon any criticism of religion, if they weighed the Bible as they have weighed astronomy and evolution, the Christian religion would not last a year.

If my reader has not studied this matter, let him read the books I have recommended, and then sit down and consider the Bible revelation and story with the same fearless 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 growth of at least ten thousand years.

Of course, it may be said that the above biblical error is only an error of time, and has no bearing on the alleged evolution of the Bible. Well, an error of a million, or of ten thousand, years is a serious thing in a divine revelation; but, as we shall see, it _has_ a bearing on evolution. Because it appears that in that ancient Accadian civilisation lie the seeds of many Bible laws and legends.

Here I quote from _Our Sun God_, by Mr. J. D. Parsons:

To commence with, it is well known to those acquainted with
the remains of the Assyrian and Babylonian civilisations that
the stories of the creation, the temptation, the fall, the deluge,
and the confusion of tongues were the common property of the
Babylonians centuries before the date of the alleged Exodus
under Moses... Even the word Sabbath is Babylonian. And the
observance of the seventh day as a Sabbath, or day of rest, by
the Accadians thousands of years before Moses, or Israel, or
even Abraham, or Adam himself could have been born or created,
is admitted by, among others, the Bishop of Manchester. For in
an address to his clergy, already mentioned, he let fall these
pregnant words:

"Who does not see that such facts as these compel us to remodel
our whole idea of the past, and that in particular to affirm that
the Sabbatical institution originated in the time of Moses, three
thousand five hundred years after it is probable that it existed
in Chaldea, is an impossibility, no matter how many Fathers of the
Church have asserted it. Facts cannot be dismissed like theories."

The Sabbath, then, is one link in the evolution of the Bible. Like the legends of the Creation, the Fall, and the Flood, it was adopted by the Jews from the Babylonians during or after the Captivity.

Of the Flood, Professor Sayce, in his _Ancient Empires_ of the East, speaks as follows:

With the Deluge the mythical history of Babylonia takes a new
departure. From this event to the Persian conquest was a period
of 36,000 years, or an astronomical cycle called _saros_.
Xisuthros, with his family and friends, alone survived the
waters which drowned the rest of mankind on account of their
sins. He had been ordered by the gods to build a ship, to pitch
it within and without, and to stock it with animals of every
species. Xisuthros sent out first a dove, then a swallow, and
lastly a raven, to discover whether the earth was dry; the dove
and the swallow returned to the ship, and it was only when the
raven flew away that the rescued hero ventured to leave his ark.
He found that he had been stranded on the peak of the mountain
of Nizir, "the mountain of the world," whereon the Accadians
believed the heavens to rest--where, too, they placed the
habitations of their gods, and the cradle of their own race.
Since Nizir lay amongst the mountains of Pir Mam, a little south
of Rowandiz, its mountain must be identified with Rowandiz itself.
On its peak Xisuthros offered sacrifices, piling up cups of wine
by sevens; and the rainbow, "the glory of Anu," appeared in
the heaven, in covenant that the world should never again be
destroyed by flood. Immediately afterwards Xisuthros and his
wife, like the Biblical Enoch, were translated to the regions of
the blest beyond Datilla, the river of Death, and his people made
their way westward to Sippara. Here they disinterred the books
buried by their late ruler before the Deluge took place, and
re-established themselves in their old country under the government
first of Erekhoos, and then of his son Khoniasbolos. Meanwhile,
other colonists had arrived in the plain of Sumer, and here,
under the leadership of the giant Etana, called Titan by the
Greek writers, they built a city of brick, and essayed to erect a
tower by means of which they might scale the sky, and so win
for themselves the immortality granted to Xisuthros... But
the tower was overthrown in the night by the winds, and Bel
frustrated their purpose by confounding their language and
scattering them on the mound.

These legends of the Flood and the Tower of Babel were obviously borrowed by the Jews during their Babylonian captivity.

Professor Sayce, in his _Ancient Empires of the East_, speaking of the Accadian king, Sargon I., says:

Legends naturally gathered round the name of the Babylonian
Solomon. Not only was he entitled "the deviser of law,
the deviser of prosperity," but it was told of him how his
father had died while he was still unborn, how his mother had
fled to the mountains, and there left him, like a second Moses,
to the care of the river in an ark of reeds and bitumen; and how
he was saved by Accir, "the water-drawer," who brought him
up as his own son, until the time came when, under the protection
of Istar, his rank was discovered, and he took his seat on
the throne of his forefathers.

From Babylon the Jews borrowed the legends of Eden, of the Fall, the Flood, the Tower of Babel; from Babylon they borrowed the Sabbath, and very likely the Commandments; and is it not possible that the legendary Moses and the legendary Sargon may be variants of a still more ancient mythical figure?

Compare Sayce with the following "Notes on the Moses Myth," from _Christianity and Mythology_, by J. M. Robertson:

NOTES ON THE MOSES MYTH.

I have been challenged for saying that the story of Moses and
the floating basket is a variant of the myth of Horos and the
floating island (_Herod_ ii. 156). But this seems sufficiently
proved by the fact that in the reign of Rameses II., according
to the monuments, there was a place in Middle Egypt which
bore the name I-en-Moshe, "_the island of Moses_." That is the
primary meaning. Brugsch, who proclaims the fact (_Egypt
Under the Pharaohs_, ii. 117), suggests that it can also mean "the
river bank of Moses." It is very obvious, however, that the
Egyptians would not have named a place by a real incident in
the life of a successful enemy, as Moses is represented in Exodus.
Name and story are alike mythological and pre-Hebraic, though
possibly Semitic. The Assyrian myth of Sargon, which is,
indeed, very close to the Hebrew, may be the oldest form of all;
but the very fact that the Hebrews located their story in Egypt
shows that they knew it to have a home there in some fashion.
The name Moses, whether it mean "the water-child" (so Deutsch)
or "the hero" (Sayce, _Hib. Lect._ p. 46), was in all likelihood
an epithet of Horos. The basket, in the latter form, was
doubtless an adaptation from the ritual of the basket-born
God-Child, as was the birth story of Jesus. In Diodorus Siculus
(i. 25) the myth runs that Isis found Horos _dead_ "on the water,"
and brought him to life again; but even in that form the clue
to the Moses birth-myth is obvious. And there are yet other
Egyptian connections for the Moses saga, since the Egyptians
had a myth of Thoth (their Logos) having slain Argus (as did
Hermes), and having had to fly for it to Egypt, where he gave
laws and learning to the Egyptians. Yet, curiously enough, this
myth probably means that the Sun God, who has in the other
story escaped the "massacre of the innocents" (the morning
stars), now plays the slayer on his own account, since the slaying
of many-eyed Argus probably means the extinction of the stars
by the morning sun (cp. Emeric-David, _Introduction_, end).
Another "Hermes" was the son of Nilus, and his name was sacred
(Cicero, _De Nat. Deor._ iii. 22, Cp. 16). The story of the
floating child, finally, becomes part of the lore of Greece.
In the myth of Apollo, the Babe-God and his sister Artemis are
secured in float-islands.

It is impossible to form a just estimate of the Bible without some knowledge of ancient history and comparative mythology. It would be impossible for me to go deeply into these matters in this small book, but I will quote a few significant passages just to show the value of such historical evidence. Here to begin with, are some passages from Mr. Grant Allen's _Evolution of the Idea of God_.

THE ORIGIN OF GODS.

Mr. Herbert Spencer has traced so admirably, in his _Principles
of Sociology_, the progress of development from the Ghost to
the God that I do not propose in this chapter to attempt much
more than a brief recapitulation of his main propositions, which,
however, I shall supplement with fresh examples, and adapt at
the same time to the conception of three successive stages in
human ideas about the Life of the Dead, as set forth in the
preceding argument.

In the earlier stage of all--the stage where the actual bodies
of the dead are preserved--gods, as such, are for the most part
unknown: it is the corpses of friends and ancestors that are
worshipped and reverenced. For example, Ellis says of the
corpse of a Tahitian chief, that it was placed in a sitting
posture under a protecting shed; "a small altar was erected
before it, and offerings of fruit, food, and flowers were
daily presented by the relatives or the priest appointed to
attend the body." (This point about the priest is of essential
importance.) The Central Americans, again, as Mr. Spencer notes,
performed similar rites before bodies dried by artificial
heat. The New Guinea people, as D'Albertis found, worship
the dried mummies of their fathers and husbands. A little
higher in the scale we get the developed mummy-worship of
Egypt and Peru, which survives even after the evolution of
greater gods, from powerful kings or chieftains. Wherever
the actual bodies of the dead are preserved, there also worship
and offerings are paid to them.

Often, however, as already noted, it is not the whole body,
but the head alone, that is specially kept and worshipped.
Thus Mr. H. O. Forbes says of the people of Buru: "The dead
are buried in the forest on some secluded spot, marked by a
_merang_, or grave pole, over which at certain intervals the
relatives place tobacco, cigarettes, and various offerings.
When the body is decomposed the son or nearest relative
disinters the head, wraps a new cloth about it, and places
it in the Matakau at the back of his house, or in a little
hut erected for it near the grave. It is the representative
of his forefathers, whose behests he holds in the greatest
respect."

Two points are worthy of notice in this interesting account,
as giving us an anticipatory hint of two further accessories
whose evolution we must trace hereafter: first, the grave-stake,
which is probably the origin of the wooden idol; and second,
the little hut erected over the head by the side of the grave,
which is undoubtedly one of the origins of the temple, or
praying-house. Observe, also, the ceremonial wrapping of the
skull in cloth and its oracular functions.

Throughout the earlier and ruder phases of human evolution
this primitive conception of ancestors or dead relatives as the
chief known object of worship survives undiluted; and ancestor-
worship remains to this day the principal religion of the Chinese
and of several other peoples. Gods, as such, are practically
unknown in China. Ancestor-worship, also, survives in many
other races as one of the main cults, even after other elements
of later religion have been superimposed upon it. In Greece
and Rome it remained to the last an important part of domestic
ritual. But in most cases a gradual differentiation is set up
in time between various classes of ghosts or dead persons, some
ghosts being considered of more importance and power than others;
and out of these last it is that gods as a rule are finally
developed. A god, in fact, is in the beginning, at least, an
exceptionally powerful and friendly ghost--a ghost able to help,
and from whose help great things may reasonably be expected.

Again, the rise of chieftainship and kingship has much to do
with the growth of a higher conception of godhead; a dead king
of any great power or authority is sure to be thought of in time
as a god of considerable importance. We shall trace out this
idea more fully hereafter in the religion of Egypt; for the
present it must suffice to say that the supposed power of the
gods in each pantheon has regularly increased in proportion to
the increased power of kings or emperors.

When we pass from the first plane of corpse preservation and
mummification to the second plane, where burial is habitual,
it might seem, at a hasty glance, as though continued worship
of the dead, and their elevation into gods, would no longer be
possible. For we saw that burial is prompted by a deadly fear
lest the corpse or ghost should return to plague the living.
Nevertheless, natural affection for parents or friends, and the
desire to insure their goodwill and aid, make these seemingly
contrary ideas reconcilable. As a matter of fact, we find that
even when men bury or burn their dead, they continue to worship
them; while, as we shall show in the sequel, even the great
stones which they roll on top of the grave to prevent the dead
from rising again become, in time, altars on which sacrifices
are offered to the spirit.

Much of the Bible is evidently legendary. Here we have a jumble of ancient myths, allegories, and mysteries drawn from many sources and remote ages, and adapted, altered, and edited so many times that in many instances their original or inner meaning has become obscure. And it is folly to accept the tangled legends and blurred or distorted symbols as the literal history of a literal tribe, and the literal account of the origin of man, and the genesis of religion.

The real roots of religion lie far deeper: deeper, perhaps, than sun-worship, ghost-worship, and fear of demons. In _The Real Origin of Religion_ occurs the following:

Quite recently theories have been advocated attempting to
prove that the minds of early men were chiefly concerned with
the increase of vegetation, and that their fancy played so much
round the mysteries of plant growth that they made them their
holiest arcana. Hence it appears that the savages were far more
modest and refined than our civilised contemporaries, for almost
all our works of imagination, both in literature and art, make
human love their theme in all its aspects, whether healthy or
pathological; whereas the savage, it seems, thought only of his
crops. Nothing can be more astonishing than this discovery,
if it be true, but there are many facts which might lead us to
believe that the romance of love inspired early art and religion
as well as modern thought.

And again:

Religion is a gorgeous efflorescence of human love. The tender
passion has left its footsteps on the sands of time in magnificent
monuments and libraries of theology.

This may seem startling to many orthodox readers, but it is no new theory, and is doubtless quite true, for all gods have been made by man, and all theologies have been evolved by man, and the odour and the colour of his human passions cling to them always, even after they are discarded. Under all man's dreams of eternal gods and eternal heavens lies man's passion for the eternal feminine. But on these subjects "Moses" spoke in parables, and I shall not speak at all.

Mr. Robertson, in _Christianity and Mythology_, says of the Bible:

It is a medley of early metaphysics and early fable--early,
that is, relatively to known Hebrew history. It ties together
two creation stories and two flood stories; it duplicates
several sets of mythic personages--as Cain and Abel, Tubal-Cain
and Jabal; it grafts the curse of Cham on the curse of Cain,
making that finally the curse of Canaan; it tells the same
offensive story twice of one patriarch and again of another;
it gives an early "metaphysical" theory of the origin of death,
life, and evil; it adapts the Egyptian story of the "Two Brothers,"
or the myth of Adonis, as the history of Joseph; it makes use
of various God-names, pretending that they always stood for
the same deity; it repeats traditions concerning mythic
founders of races--if all this be not "a medley of early fable,"
what is it?

I quote next from _The Bible and the Child_, in which Dean Farrar says:

Some of the books of Scripture are separated from others by the
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 to Earth by night.

Any man who denied that theory in those days was in danger of being murdered as an Infidel.

To-day our ideas are very different. Hardly any educated man or woman in the world believes that the world is flat, or that the Sun revolves round the Earth, or that what we call the sky is a solid substance, like a domed ceiling.

Advanced thinkers, even amongst the Christians, believe that the world is round, that it is one of a series of planets revolving round the Sun, that the Sun is only one of many millions of other suns, that these suns were not created simultaneously, but at different periods, probably separated by millions or billions of years.

We have all, Christians and Infidels alike, been obliged to acknowledge that the Earth is not the centre of the whole Universe, but only a minor planet revolving around, and dependent upon, one of myriads of suns.

God, called by Christians "Our Heavenly Father," created all things. He created not only the world, but the whole universe. He is all-wise, He is all-powerful, He is all-loving, and He is revealed to us in the Scriptures.

Let us see. Let us try to imagine what kind of a God the creator of this Universe would be, and let us compare him with the God, or Gods, revealed to us in the Bible, and in the teachings of the Church.

We have seen the account of the Universe and its creation, as given in the revealed Scriptures. Let us now take a hasty view of the Universe and its creation as revealed to us by science.

What is the Universe like, as far as our limited knowledge goes?

Our Sun is only one sun amongst many millions. Our planet is only one of eight which revolve around him.

Our Sun, with his planets and comets, comprises what is known as the solar system.

There is no reason to suppose that his is the only Solar System: there may be many millions of solar systems. For aught we know, there may be millions of systems, each containing millions of solar systems.

Let us deal first with the solar system of which we are a part.

The Sun is a globe of 866,200 miles diameter. His diameter is more than 108 times that of the Earth. His volume is 1,305,000 times the volume of the Earth. All the eight planets added together only make one-seven-hundredth part of his weight. His circumference is more than two and a-half millions of miles. He revolves upon his axis in 25 1/4 days, or at a speed of nearly 4,000 miles an hour.

This immense and magnificent globe diffuses heat and light to all the other planets.

Without the light and heat of the Sun no life would now be, or in the past have been, possible on this Earth, or any other planet of the solar system.

The eight planets of the solar system are divided into four inferior and four superior.

The inferior planets are Mercury, Venus, the Earth, and Mars. The superior are Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune.

The diameters of the smaller planets are as follow: Mercury, 3,008 miles; Mars, 5,000 miles; Venus, 7,480 miles; the Earth, 7,926 miles.

The diameters of the large planets are: Jupiter, 88,439 miles; Saturn, 75,036 miles; Neptune, 37,205 miles; Uranus, 30,875 miles.

The volume of Jupiter is 1,389 times, of Saturn 848 times, of Neptune 103 times, and of Uranus 59 times the volume of the Earth.

The mean distances from the Sun are: Mercury, 36 million miles; Venus, 67 million miles; the Earth, 93 million miles; Mars, 141 million miles; Jupiter, 483 million miles; Saturn, 886 million miles; Uranus, 1,782 million miles; Neptune, 2,792 million miles.

To give an idea of the meaning of these distances, I may say that a train travelling night and day at 60 miles an hour would take quite 176 years to come from the Sun to the Earth.

The same train, at the same speed, would be 5,280 years in travelling from the Sun to Neptune.

Reckoning that Neptune is the outermost planet of the solar system, that system would have a diameter of 5,584 millions of miles.

If we made a chart of the solar system on a scale of 1 inch to a million miles, we should need a sheet of paper 465 feet 4 inches wide. On this sheet the Sun would have a diameter of less than 1 inch, and the Earth would be about the size of a pin-prick.

If an express train, going at 60 miles an hour, had to travel round the Earth's orbit, it would be more than 1,000 years on the journey. If the Earth moved no faster, our winter would last more than 250 years. But in the solar system the speeds are as wonderful as the sizes. The Earth turns upon its axis at the rate of 1,000 miles an hour, and travels in its orbit round the Sun at the rate of more than 1,000 miles a minute, or 66,000 miles an hour.

So much for the size of the solar system. It consists of a Sun and eight planets, and the outer planet's orbit is one of 5,584 millions of miles in diameter, which it would take an express train, at 60 miles an hour, 10,560 years to cross.

But this distance is as nothing when we come to deal with the distances of the other stars from our Sun.

The distance from our Sun to the nearest fixed (?) star is more than 20 millions of millions of miles. Our express train, which crosses the diameter of the solar system in 10,560 years, would take, if it went 60 miles an hour day and night, about 40 million years to reach the nearest fixed star from the Sun.

And if we had to mark the nearest fixed star on our chart made on a scale of 1 inch to the million miles, we should find that whereas a sheet of 465 feet would take in the outermost planet of the solar system, a sheet to take in the nearest fixed star would have to be about 620 miles wide. On this sheet, as wide as from London to Inverness, the Sun would be represented by a dot three-quarters of an inch in diameter, and the Earth by a pin-prick.

But these immense distances only relate to the _nearest_ stars. Now, the nearest stars are about four "light years" distant from us. That is to say, that light, travelling at a rate of about 182,000 miles in _one second_, takes four years to come from the nearest fixed star to the Earth.

But I have seen the distance from the Earth to the Great Nebula in Orion given as _a thousand light years_, or 250 times the distance of the fixed star above alluded to.

To reach that nebula at 60 miles an hour, an express train would have to travel for 35 millions of years multiplied by 250--that is to say, for 8,750 million years.

And yet there are millions of stars whose distances are even greater than the distance of the Great Nebula in Orion.

How many stars are there? No one can even guess. But L. Struve estimates the number of those visible to the great telescopes at 20 millions.

Twenty millions of suns. And as for the size of these suns, Sir Robert Ball says Sirius is ten times as large as our Sun; and a well-known astronomer, writing in the _English Mechanic_ about a week ago, remarks that Alpha Orionis (Betelgeuze) has probably 700 times the light of our Sun.

Looking through my telescope, which is only 3-inch aperture, I have seen star clusters of wonderful beauty in the Pleiades and in Cancer. There is, in the latter constellation, a dim star which, when viewed through my glass, becomes a constellation larger, more brilliant, and more beautiful than Orion or the Great Bear. I have looked at these jewelled sun-clusters many a time, and wondered over them. But I have never once thought of believing that they were specially created to be lesser lights to the Earth.

And now let me quote from that grand book of Richard A. Proctor's, _The Expanse of Heaven_, a fine passage descriptive of some of the wonders of the "Milky Way":

There are stars in all orders of brightness, from those which
(seen with the telescope) resemble in lustre the leading glories
of the firmament, down to tiny points of light only caught by
momentary twinklings. Every variety of arrangement is seen.
Here the stars are scattered as over the skies at night; there
they cluster in groups, as though drawn together by some irresistible
power; in one region they seem to form sprays of stars like
diamonds sprinkled over fern leaves; elsewhere they lie in
streams and rows, in coronets and loops and festoons, resembling
the star festoon which, in the constellation Perseus, garlands
the black robe of night. Nor are varieties of colour wanting
to render the display more wonderful and more beautiful. Many
of the stars which crowd upon the view are red, orange, and yellow
Among them are groups of two and three and four (multiple stars
as they are called), amongst which blue and green and lilac and
purple stars appear, forming the most charming contrast to the
ruddy and yellow orbs near which they are commonly seen.

Millions and millions--countless millions of suns. Innumerable galaxies and systems of suns, separated by black gulfs of space so wide that no man can realise the meaning of the figures which denote their stretch. Suns of fire and light, whirling through vast oceans of space like swarms of golden bees. And round them planets whirling at thousands of miles a minute.

And on Earth there are forms of life so minute that millions of them exist in a drop of water. There are microscopic creatures more beautiful and more highly finished than any gem, and more complex and effective than the costliest machine of human contrivance. In _The Story of Creation_ Mr. Ed. Clodd tells us that one cubic inch of rotten stone contains 41 thousand million vegetable skeletons of diatoms.

I cut the following from a London morning paper:

It was discovered some few years ago that a peculiar bacillus
was present in all persons suffering from typhoid, and in all
foods and drinks which spread the disease. Experiments were
carried out, and it was assumed, not without good reason, that
the bacillus was the primary cause of the malady, and it was
accordingly labelled the typhoid bacillus.

But the bacteriologists further discovered that the typhoid
bacillus was present in water which was not infectious, and in
persons who were not ill, or had never been ill, with typhoid.

So now a theory is propounded that a healthy typhoid bacillus
does not cause typhoid, but that it is only when the bacillus
is itself sick of a fever, or, in other words, is itself the
prey of some infinitely minuter organisms, which feed on it
alone, that it works harm to mortal men.

The bacillus is so small that one requires a powerful microscope to see him, and his blood may be infested with bacilli as small to him as he is to us.

And there are millions, and more likely billions, of suns!

Talk about Aladdin's palace, Sinbad's valley of diamonds, Macbeth's witches, or the Irish fairies! How petty are their exploits, how tawdry are their splendours, how paltry are their riches, when we compare them to the romance of science.

When did a poet conceive an idea so vast and so astounding as the theory of evolution? What are a few paltry, lumps of crystallised carbon compared to a galaxy of a million million suns? Did any Eastern inventor of marvels ever suggest such a human feat as that accomplished by the men who have, during the last handful of centuries, spelt out the mystery of the universe? These scientists have worked miracles before which those of the ancient priests and magicians are mere tricks of hanky-panky.

Look at the romance of geology; at the romance of astronomy; at the romance of chemistry; at the romance of the telescope, and the microscope, and the prism. More wonderful than all, consider the story of how flying atoms in space became suns, how suns made planets, how planets changed from spheres of flame and raging fiery storm to worlds of land and water. How in the water specks of jelly became fishes, fishes reptiles, reptiles mammals, mammals monkeys; monkeys men; until, from the fanged and taloned cannibal, roosting in a forest, have developed art and music, religion and science; and the children of the jellyfish can weigh the suns, measure the stellar spaces, ride on the ocean or in the air, and speak to each other from continent to continent.

Talk about fairy tales! what is this? You may look through a telescope, and see the nebula that is to make a sun floating, like a luminous mist, three hundred million miles away. You may look again, and see another sun in process of formation. You may look again, and see others almost completed. You may look again and again, and see millions of suns and systems spread out across the heavens like rivers of living gems.

You will say that all this speaks of a Creator. I shall not contradict you. But what kind of Creator must He be who has created such a universe as this?

Do you think He is the kind of Creator to make blunders and commit crimes? Can you, after once thinking of the Milky Way, with its rivers of suns, and the drop of water teeming with spangled dragons, and the awful abysses of dark space, through which comets shoot at a speed a thousand times as fast as an express train--can you, after seeing Saturn's rings, and Jupiter's moons, and the clustered gems of Hercules, consent for a moment to the allegation that the creator of all this power and glory got angry with men, and threatened them with scabs and sores, and plagues of lice and frogs? Can you suppose that such a creator would, after thousands of years of effort, have failed even now to make His repeated revelations comprehensible? Do you believe that He would be driven across the unimaginable gulfs of space, but of the transcendent glory of His myriad resplendent suns, to die on a cross, in order to win back to Him the love of the puny creatures on one puny planet in the marvellous universe His power had made?

Do you believe that the God who imagined and created such a universe could be petty, base, cruel, revengeful, and capable of error? I do not believe it.

And now let us examine the character and conduct of this God as depicted for us in the Bible--the book which is alleged to have been directly revealed by God Himself.

JEHOVAH THE ADOPTED HEAVENLY FATHER OF CHRISTIANITY

In giving the above brief sketch of the known universe my object was to suggest that the Creator of a universe of such scope and grandeur must be a Being of vast power and the loftiest dignity.

Now, the Christians claim that their God created this universe--not the universe He is described, in His own inspired word, as creating, but the universe revealed by science; the universe of twenty millions of suns.

And the Christians claim that this God is a God of love, a God omnipotent, omnipresent, and eternal. And the Christians claim that this great God, the Creator of our wonderful universe, is the God revealed to us in the Bible.

Let us, then, go to the Bible, and find out for ourselves whether the God therein revealed is any more like the ideal Christian God than the universe therein revealed is like the universe since discovered by man without the aid of divine inspiration.

As for the biblical God, Jahweh, or Jehovah, I shall try to show from the Bible itself that He was not all-wise, nor all-powerful, nor omnipresent; that He was not merciful nor just; but that, on the contrary, He was fickle, jealous, dishonourable, immoral, vindictive, barbarous, and cruel.

Neither was He, in any sense of the words, great nor good. But, in fact, He was a tribal god, an idol, made by man; and, as the idol of a savage and ignorant tribe, was Himself a savage and ignorant monster.

First then, as to my claim that Jahweh, or Jehovah, was a tribal god. I shall begin by quoting from _Shall We Understand the Bible?_ by the Rev. T. Rhondda Williams:

The theology of the Jahwist is very childish and elementary,
though it is not all on the same level. He thinks of God very
much as in human form, holding intercourse with men almost
as one of themselves. His document begins with Genesis ii. 4,
and its first portion continues, without break, to the end of
chapter iv. This portion contains the story of Eden. Here
Jahweh _moulds_ dust into human form, and _breathes_ into it;
_plants_ a garden, and puts the man in it. Jahweh comes to the
man in his sleep, and takes part of his body to make a woman,
and so skilfully, apparently, that the man never wakes under
the operation. Jahweh _walks_ in the garden like a man in the
cool of the day. He even _makes coats_ for Adam and Eve.
Further on the Jahwist has a flood story, in which Jahweh _repents_
that he had made man, and decides to drown him, saving only
one family. When all is over, and Noah sacrifices on his new
altar, Jahweh _smells_ a sweet savour, just as a hungry man
smells welcome food. When men build the Tower of Babel,
Jahweh _comes down_ to see it--he cannot see it from where he
is. In Genesis xviii. the Jahwist tells a story of three men
coming to Abraham's tent. Abraham gives them water to wash
their feet, and bread to eat, and Sarah makes cakes for them,
and "they did eat"; altogether, they seemed to have had a nice
time. As the story goes on, he leaves you to infer that one
of these was Jahweh himself. It is J. who describes the story
of Jacob _wrestling_ with some mysterious person, who, by inference,
is Jahweh. He tells a very strange story in Exodus iv. 24, that
when Moses was returning into Egypt, at Jahweh's own request,
Jahweh met him at a lodging-place, and sought to kill him. In
Exodus xiv. 15 it is said Jahweh took the wheels off the chariots
of the Egyptians. If we wanted to believe that such statements
were true at all, we should resort to the device of saying they
were figurative. But J. meant them literally. The Jahwist
would have no difficulty in thinking of God in this way. The
story of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah belongs to this
same document, in which, you remember, Jahweh says: "I will go
down now, and see whether they have done altogether according
to the cry of it which is come unto me; and if not, I will know"
(Gen. xviii. 21). That God was omniscient and omnipresent had
never occurred to the Jahwist. Jahweh, like a man, had to go and
see if he wanted to know. There is, however, some compensation
in the fact that he can move about without difficulty--he can
come down and go up. One might say, perhaps, that in J., though
Jahweh cannot _be_ everywhere, he can go to almost any place.
All this is just like a child's thought. The child, at Christmas,
can believe that, though Santa Claus cannot be everywhere, he
can move about with wonderful facility, and, though he is a man,
he is rather mysterious. The Jahwist's thought of God represents
the childhood stage of the national life.

Later, Mr. Williams writes:

All this shows that at one time Jahweh was one of many gods;
other gods were real gods. The Israelites themselves believed,
for example, that Chemosh was as truly the god of the Moabites
as Jahweh was theirs, and they speak of Chemosh giving territory
to his people to inherit, just as Jahweh had given them territory
(Judges xi. 24).