In saying this, I do not assert that everyone gives false witness knowingly, any more than I would blame a tradesman for using false scales, or weights, if he could demonstrate that he had purchased them as true, and could show that he had never tampered with them. Yet the law would punish such a man for their use, arguing that he ought to have made inquiry. In one of the large towns of Great Britain, on one occasion, a merchant, believed to be both religious and honest, sold to a broker a cargo of stuff which had no existence, and, when the delivery had to be made, the first destroyed himself, and the second was adjudged to be a culpable bankrupt, because he had taken the existence of the oil for granted, without investigation. Just so it is with ordinary divines; they assume certain statements in their own religious book to be true--they are taught to shut their eyes to the absurdities in the same volume, and to explain away, in one manner or another, everything which militates against common sense. By this plan they contrive to sell, as sterling stuff, something which is made of base material, without knowingly being parties to a fraud. In the same way a shopman may, on the word of the manufacturer, dispose of a piece of goods as wholly silk, although he has a shrewd presumption that the fabric contains a large proportion of cotton. For such individuals we have the proverb, "there are none so blind as those who will not see." But these very theologians of whom we are speaking, when they are dealing with the sacred books, ordinary customs, ritual, and the like, of other people, having a different religion to their own, are exact, in the extreme--every absurdity is exhibited ruthlessly; every legend is ridiculed; every discrepancy is magnified; and everything which betrays ignorance, or want of scientific knowledge, is paraded with inglorious ceremony. On the other hand, everything good which is to be found therein is, if possible, suppressed. A book, which was, for a long time, a standard one amongst our divines, entitled, _Christ and Many Masters_, is particularly open to this charge. In it there is throughout a _suppressio veri_, a _suggestio falsi_, and scarcely a page that does not bear false witness. If there were a law to punish those who adulterate or falsify "truth," our magistrates would be kept extremely busy.