"There is no great honour or pleasure, although there is much wearisome toil, in gathering the materials for proving that Genesis nearly always blunders in its attempts at statements of fact; that it is repeatedly chronologically incorrect, and in the chronologies of its principal versions utterly irreconcilable; that copyists, through ignorance, carelessness, or design, have in many places incorrectly transcribed the text; that the translators, according to their respective creeds, vary in their interpretations of different momentous passages; that the Hebrew language itself has been altered by the addition of vowel points, by means of which a sense is often given entirely different from the original intention; and that the majority of the ancient versions contain different and contradictory readings of various important verses. But it is absolutely necessary to do all this in a form accessible to the general reader so long as the Church persists, under statutory sanction and indorsement, in its teaching to the people from their early childhood, that this Bible is God's Word, free from blemish. Genesis is forced upon the child's brain as God's Word by nurse and pedagogue, and the mode of thinking of the scholar is in consequence utterly warped in favour of the divinity of the book before his reason has opportunity to mature for its examination. If the book only had claimed for it that which may be claimed for all books--namely, in part or whole to represent the genius, education, and manners of the people and the times from whom and which it issued, then it might fairly be objected by supporters of the Bible that the tone of criticism here adopted is not of the highest order, and that the petty cavillings about misplaced names, misspelled words, incorrect dates and numbers, and geographical errors, etc., are hardly worthy the attention of a serious student. But as the Bible is declared to be the revelation and representative of perfect intelligence to the whole human family; as it is placed by the whole of its preachers immeasurably above all other books, with a claim to dominate, and if necessary to overturn, the teachings of all other books; as it is alleged that the Bible is free from the errors of thought and fact more or less found in every other book; and as it is by Act of Parliament declared to be a criminal offence in this country for any person to deny this book to be God's Holy Word, it is not only a right, but it becomes an unavoidable duty on the part of a Freethinking critic to present as plainly as possible to the notice of the people every weakness of the text, however trivial, that may serve to show that the Bible, or any portion of it, is fallible, that it is imperfect, that so far from being above all books, it is often below them as a mere literary production."[96] [Footnote 96: Preface to "The Bible: What it is," 1865.]