We cannot believe such a statement. No man can believe it who tests it by his reason in the same way in which he would test any modern problem. If the leaders of religion brought the same vigour and subtlety of mind to bear upon religion which they bring to bear upon any criticism of religion, if they weighed the Bible as they have weighed astronomy and evolution, the Christian religion would not last a year. If my reader has not studied this matter, let him read the books I have recommended, and then sit down and consider the Bible revelation and story with the same fearless honesty and clear common sense with which he would consider the Bibles of the Mohammedan, or Buddhist, or Hindoo, and then ask himself the question: "Is the Bible a holy and inspired book, and the word of God to man, or is it an incongruous and contradictory collection of tribal traditions and ancient fables, written by men of genius and imagination?" THE EVOLUTION OF THE BIBLE We now reach the second stage in our examination, which is the claim that no religion known to man can be truly said to be original. All religions, the Christian religion included, are adaptations or variants of older religions. Religions are not _revealed_: they are _evolved_. If a religion were revealed by God, that religion would be perfect in whole and in part, and would be as perfect at the first moment of its revelation as after ten thousand years of practice. There has never been a religion which fulfils those conditions. According to Bible chronology, Adam was created some six thousand years ago. Science teaches that man existed during the glacial epoch, which was at least fifty thousand years before the Christian era. Here I recommend the study of Laing's _Human Origins_, Parson's _Our Sun God_, Sayce's _Ancient Empires of the East_, and Frazer's _Golden Bough_. In his visitation charge at Blackburn, in July, 1889, the Bishop of Manchester spoke as follows: Now, if these dates are accepted, to what age of the world shall we assign that Accadian civilisation and literature which so long preceded Sargo I. and the statutes of Sirgullah? I can best answer you in the words of the great Assyriologist, F. Hommel: "If," he says, "the Semites were already settled in Northern Babylonia (Accad) in the beginning of the fourth thousand B.C. in possession of the fully developed Shumiro-Accadian culture adopted by them--a culture, moreover, which appears to have sprouted like a cutting from Shumir, then the latter must be far, far older still, and have existed in its _completed_ form in the fifth thousand B.C., an age to which I unhesitatingly ascribe the South Babylonian incantations."... Who does not see that such facts as these compel us to remodel our whole idea of the past?