Again, in Buddha's writings, and in those of his followers, there is an absence of those obscene tales with which the Old Testament abounds. We seek in vain for counterparts of the story of Lot and his daughters, of Onan, of Joseph and the wife of Potiphar, of Judah and Tamar, David and Bathsheba, Amnon and his sister, Zimri Cozbi and Phinehas, and the like. It is true, that in some Buddhist writings, there is a cosmogony introduced more preposterous than that in the Bible; but there are no parallels to the tales of Noah, of Moses, and of Israel in Egypt, the desert, and Palestine. Indeed, when we remember that Sakya Muni was an Oriental, accustomed to inflated language, we are struck by the plainness of his speech. If we now ask ourselves, as earnest practical Christians--that is, as men, anxious and eager to attain to religious truth, and desirous of teaching only those things which would tend towards sound edification and to a pure morality--what parts of the Bible most offend sense of propriety, we should answer, that they are its untenable cosmogony; its preposterous accounts of the longevity of the men reported as being the earliest formed; the legend of the flood; the origin of the rainbow; the tales of Moses, Pharaoh, the plagues of Egypt, the sojourn in the desert, the capture of Canaan, the miraculous battles, in which each man of Israel put a thousand enemies to flight. We would wholly expunge the fabulous account of Elijah and Elisha; the ravings after vengeance uttered by the prophets; the apocryphal episodes described in the books of Jonah and Daniel, every obscene story, and disgusting speech and writing, whether uttered as a threat against Israel or his enemies. In like manner we would wish to expunge, from the teaching of Jesus, everything relating to the immediate destruction of the world--everything connected with community of goods, the advantages of beggary, and the potency of faith and prayer. We would suppress every miracle, and say nothing of a resurrection of the dead Jesus. We would equally abandon any attempt to describe Heaven or Hell, or any intermediate state. When all these were removed from the Bible, we positively should have very little left, except a certain amount of morality which is sound, and a large portion which is radically bad. To make such an emendated book as perfect as possible, we might, with great advantage, correct it from the teaching of Buddha or from the sayings of Socrates, Plato, Epic-tetus, and even of Confucius; and when all was completed, it would be found that all men, everywhere, have had instinctive notions, more or less definite, of morality, but have allowed their animal passions to overcome their better feelings. Far too many of us know the good, but yet the bad pursue.