It was a very caravansary of iniquity and despair. There were men in hundreds, women in hundreds, women with numerous children. Unemployed, uncared for, herded together like brutes, they passed the time in gambling, drinking, fighting, masquerading, singing lewd songs, telling tales of vice and villainy, planning fresh crimes. Among the prisoners there were boys and girls from nine to thirteen years of age, growing up for the gallows-though there was little need to grow, for a child of ten was not too young for the hangman.

How from these frightful abuses public sentiment gradually demanded relief, how, through the labors of such lovers of the Bible as Granville Sharp, William Wilberforce, and their friends, slavery was abolished in the British dominions, how eventually the conditions of manual toil for men, women, and children, which were as intolerable in their way as the lives of prisoners, were made more humane-these are reforms known to all the world, and they were achieved through the energy which the Bible put into the souls of philanthropists.

When Nicholas I was emperor of Russia there were millions of serfs in his domain. His son Alexander expressed profound sorrow for them. When he was asked the reason for his compassion, he replied that he derived his sympathy "from reading the Bible which teaches that we are all brethren." When at length he became Czar he gave the serfs their

His

freedom, to the astonishment of the world. Abraham Lincoln was one of the most diligent readers of the Bible in modern times. mind and heart were literally full of the Scriptures. He was ruled by them in thought, word, and deed. His hatred for human slavery was not merely the result of a nature singularly humane, but also of his veneration for a book which taught him the iniquity of regarding any man, however degraded, as rightfully the chattel of another, however strong and wise. It needs but a superficial acquaintance with reforms in the past hundred years to induce one to agree with William Lloyd Garrison, "Take away the Bible from us, and our warfare against intemperance, and impurity, and oppression, and infidelity, and crime is at an end. We have no authority to speak, no courage to act."

CHAPTER V

THE BIBLE AS ETHICAL AND SPIRITUAL
LITERATURE

REPUTATIONS are sometimes ruined by assigning to men motives of which they have never dreamed. Religion may be libeled in the same way. When Ingersoll the agnostic went up and down the United States making flippant people shriek with laughter at his paltry witticisms over what he alleged to be Christianity, he was really pounding a theology that had been dead for at least fifty years, though his auditors were not aware of the deception that was being practiced on them, never having given ten minutes of serious investigation to the problems of religion, or to the development of the greatest of the sciences. The attacks made on the Bible, in so far as they seek to discredit its actual worth, are chiefly and ignorantly directed against a Bible that never had any existence outside the misconceptions of uncritical persons. For a great proportion of this fanciful misinterpretation of the significance and claims of the Bible its own avowed friends are responsible, as has already been explained. A further illustration

of this fatuity will fittingly introduce us to an assessment of the true values of the Bible as literature with a moral and spiritual function.

I

We are told that Alexander the Great placed under his pillow at night a copy of Homer's Iliad and the sword with which he carved his way toward universal empire. Though we may properly regard the Bible as, in a true sense, both intellectual stimulus and militant weapon, yet a superstitious veneration for the physical entity which embodies its sacred literature is absurd and belittling. Some people pack copies of the Bible away in their traveling bags when they begin a journey, as women place sachet packets among their clothing, or as pagans hide talismans and charms on their persons to keep away evil powers. They have seen the Bible kissed by witnesses in court as a solemn pledge of veracity. They know that it is believed to have a sanctity which is supposed to attach to no other book. Though they do not intend to manage their lives by an undeviating fidelity to its precepts which they seldom read, yet they would on no account be at any time without a copy of the Scriptures as a protection against peril and plague.

On a little higher range, but one that is almost as injurious to the character of the Bible, are those persons who consider it the ultimate authority on every subject, no matter how remotely or meaninglessly it may approach such a question. They are determined to press this doctrine to the utmost. The result is that, whenever a clash comes between a biblical writer who was working from the standpoint of the knowledge of his day and a scientific investigator who has all the advantage of modern familiarity with the universe, such misguided individuals are compelled either to stultify themselves by denying the evidence of their senses, or to surrender their faith in the validity of the Scriptures. They are like the Caliph Omar, who, when he had captured Alexandria, and was shown its magnificent library, asked, "What is the good of all these books? They are either in accord with the Koran, or they are contrary to it. If the former, they are superfluous, if the latter they are pernicious. In either case let them be burned." So perished many priceless products of human genius. A like attitude is taken toward all literature, of whatever sort, when compared with the Bible, by those who are convinced that it is the final word on every matter. If there be discovered any supposed wisdom that seems to impair the credit of the