We next proceeded to take up the study of the Hebrew Bible; for it is evident that so long as this book is clothed with infallible authority, arguments based on fact and logic avail nothing, and reason is helpless before any random scriptural quotation. We examined the composition of the work: we learned that many of those portions that are esteemed most ancient, are of comparatively recent origin; that the text is studded with discrepancies, and that the marks of savage and cruel customs such as the offering of human sacrifices to the Deity, are still clearly indented on the sacred volume. The conclusion followed that a book so full of contradiction, so deeply tinged with the evidence of human fallibility, could not have been the work of a divine author. The inspiration theory being thus divested of its support, we considered how baneful *had been its influence on the course of human history; how it had retarded the progress of the Jews among whom it arose; how it had checked the intellectual development of Europe, how it had hampered the advancement of science; how it had offered a specious plea for the despotism of kings, and of the holy Inquisition; how in our own days it had become in the hands of the Southern slaveholders a most formidable means of perpetuating their infamous scheme of oppression. We concluded that whatever is false and worthless in the book we should feel at liberty to reject, while what is great and holy would not therefore become less great or less holy to us, because it was proven to be man's work, man's testimony to the divine possibilities inherent in the human soul. We went on striving to penetrate more deeply the origin of that mysterious power which we call religion. To us it appeared that the feeling of the sublime is the root of the religious sentiment in man. That the Vedahs, Avesta, Koran, Bible are the songs of the nations on the theme of the infinite; and that the moral ideal, whether we endow it with personality or not, presents to us the highest type of sublimity and is the sole object worthy of religious reverence. "Who dare express him And who profess him Saying, 'I believe in him?' Who feeling, seeing, deny his being Saying I believe him not? "Call it then what thou wilt Call it bliss, heart, love, God; I have no name to give it. Feeling is all in all, The name is sound and smoke." We maintained lastly, that the entrance of the moral into the sphere of religion has endowed the latter with whatever excellence it now possesses.