Well! It must not be thought that we have now disarmed the bibliolaters. They have still a powerful weapon left with which to defend the Bible: Suppose Ezra did compose or compile the Book! Is it not, nevertheless, true that the Bible teaches righteousness? The argument is something like this: The Bible may not be true, but it is very moral. In our opinion, however, it is even less moral than it is true. A book which commands murder, plunder, persecution for opinion sake, slavery and credulity of the most abject kind, can not very well be recommended as a moral text-book. Of course, there are in the Bible, as also in the Vedas or the Koran, splendid passages of truth and beauty, but by selecting only one set of passages and ignoring the rest any book could be made pure. Matthew Arnold professes to have discovered in the Old Bible "the Eternal, not ourselves, making for Righteousness," one of his proofs being Ps. 50:23: "To him that ordereth his conversation _right_ shall be shown the salvation of God." But the Revised Version has robbed the Oxford professor of his text by completely changing its meaning: "Whoso offereth the sacrifice of thanksgiving glorifieth me, and prepareth a way that I may show him the salvation of God" (See margin of Revised Version). There is nothing in the original about "ordering one's conduct or conversation right," it was put there by the translators whose moral culture was far superior to the authors they were rendering into English. Moreover, Matthew Arnold, fully conceding the conclusions of the "higher critics," e. g., that the events narrated in the Bible are in most cases pure fabrications; that they are the work of myth-mongers who sought to pass as genuine and divine, documents which they had themselves forged for partisan purposes--who plagiarized from Assyrian liturgies, and wilfully misrepresented as well as interpolated the history of their nation--asks us, nevertheless, to look upon these political schemers and _poseurs_, as having but one all-consuming passion--_righteousness_!