I was a lover of the Bible. I loved it and revered it as the Word of God. I was converted by reading the Bible. I believed the Bible was the Word of God, given by the Holy Spirit through the holy men of old; that the Bible contained truth only, and no error. The Holy Spirit cannot be the author of error. God cannot make mistakes. I believed, therefore, that all the historical facts of the Bible were true facts, and all the biographical narratives true narratives, and not made up by men, and all the Biblical heroes true persons, and not fabulous ones. I believed that its doctrines and teachings were all true, good, and perfect and “profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness.” In fact, I believed that the Bible was a perfect revelation of the will and wisdom and love of God, that we have only to dig into it and find out the precious truth of its deep meaning, and honor it by belief and obedience. If I found any difficult passage in the Bible, which I could not understand, or reconcile with my reason, I always put the blame of the doubt upon my own imperfect intellect, and believed that the Bible was all right, though I could not understand it. Thus I believed in the absolute divine authority of the Bible, and on this divine Book, as on the rock of ages, I built my faith in Christianity as the absolute religion. Not _a_ religion, but _the_ religion of the world. Now came the higher critics and said, “No,” to all of these my beliefs in the Bible. In the first place, they said, “the Bible is not the Word of God, given through the Holy Spirit, in any such sense as you have believed. The Bible is a book written by men, just as all other books are written. Therefore the words contained in it are not the words of God himself, but the words of men, perhaps pious men, good men, devout men, and religiously-minded men. But they are all men and nothing more. And as all men are liable to make mistakes, and are apt to invent stories, and manufacture the facts, so the Bible contains many untrue narratives, and made-up stories. Many of the historical personages of the Bible are imaginary heroes and not true persons. Moreover, the doctrines propounded in the Bible are not all sound doctrines. Some are quite unsound. The teachings of the Bible are not all wise and profitable, and some are not applicable to modern times at all. They may have been good enough in the dark ages of the ancient world, but are not suitable to this modern age. So the Bible does not contain truth only, but it contains error also.