With this chapter our review of the Bible ends. We have examined successively the authenticity of its books, the credibility of its statements, and the morality of its teachings. The authenticity of the Bible must be abandoned. It will be abandoned, and abandoned soon. Its credibility, impaired by a knowledge of its lack of authenticity and the exposure of its numberless errors, will be contended for awhile longer. But this, in turn, will go. When its credibility has been destroyed, and it is acknowledged to be mostly a volume of fables and legends, priestcraft continuing to survive, the clergy, as a dernier resort, will descant upon the divine lessons of morality taught by these fables and legends. But the relentless iconoclasts of criticism will break this image also, and the Bible as a moral guide and religious authority will be laid away forever. APPENDIX. Arguments Against the Divine Origin and in Support of the Human Origin of the Bible. A celebrated theologian has used with much ingenuity and effect the watch as an argument in support of the divine origin of the universe. I have a watch. Like other watches it is not infallible. But supposing that I should claim for it infallibility and divinity; that while other watches are of human invention and workmanship, this particular make of watches is the work of God. The claim would be deemed too absurd for serious consideration. I would be regarded as a lunatic or a jester. Now, it is no more absurd to claim infallibility and divinity for a watch than it is to claim infallibility and divinity for a book. Yet millions of people of recognized sanity and intelligence profess to believe, and many of them do sincerely believe, that a book called the Bible is divine. How do we account for this? It is simply the result of centuries of religious education. I could have taken my children and taught them that my watch is divine. Had I kept them isolated as far as possible from other people, had I commanded them to shun discussion, and forbidden them to reason about it, as the clergy do in regard to the Bible, they would probably believe it. I was taught that the Bible is divine. I believed it. But in a fortunate hour I listened to the voice of Reason; I examined the claims of its advocates; I read it; and the halo of holiness surrounding the old book vanished. As a supplement to my review of the Bible I shall present some arguments, thirty-six in number, against the divine origin and in support of the human origin of the Bible. The brevity and incompleteness of many of them will, I admit, justify the conclusion not proven. I have space for little more than a mere statement of them. The evidence supporting them will be found in the preceding chapters of this book.