9. The moral and theological _materials_ of many religious books are as faulty as their style, and the injury they do the Gospel is incalculable. Here is a systematic writer in whose hands all the riches and magnificence of revelation shrink into a meagre list of doctrinal points, and not a single verse in the Bible is allowed to tell its meaning, or even allowed to have one, till it has been forced under torture to maintain one of his points. You are next confronted with a prater about the invisible world, that makes you shrink away into darkness; and then you are met with a grim zealot for such a revolting theory of the Divine attributes and government, that he seems to delight in representing the Deity as a dreadful king of furies, whose dominion is overshadowed with vengeance, whose music is the cries of victims, and whose glory requires to be illustrated by the ruin of His creation. One cannot help deploring that the great mass of religious books were not consigned to the flames before they were permitted to reach the eyes of the public. Books which exhibit Christianity and its claims with insipid feebleness, or which cramp its majesty into an artificial form at once distorted and mean, must grievously injure its influence. An intelligent Christian cannot look into such works without feeling thankful that they were not the books from which he got his conceptions of the Gospel. Nothing would induce him to put them into the hands of an inquiring youth, and he would be sorry to see them on the table of an infidel, or in the library of his children, or of a student for the ministry.--_Foster's Essays._