The Christian Bible, as now accepted by Protestants (for it must be borne in mind that it has been altered and amended on various occasions, thus altering the canonical Word of God), is composed of thirty-nine books in the Old-Testament department, and twenty-seven in the New; the whole constituting a multifarious collection of old oracles, obsolete dogmas, Oriental legends, ancient myths, religious reveries, beautiful precepts, poetry, heart-touching pathos, wild fancies, preceptive admonitions, martial exploits, domestic regulations, broken, disjointed narratives, ritual rules, and spiritual ideas; including also cosmogony, history, theocracy, theology, annals, romance, prophecy, rhapsody, psalmody, mythology, allegory, dreams, tradition, legislation, ethics, politics, and religion, all jumbled together without arrangement, division, classification, or order; committed to writing in various ages and nations and countries, and by various writers, extending over a period of several thousand years, including nearly every form of composition known to human ingenuity,--gay, grave, tragical, logical, philosophical, religious, and romantic,--emanating from Gods, angels, men, and devils; recorded, some of it in mountains, some of it in caves, some of it on the banks of rivers, some of it in forests, some of it in deserts, and some of it under the shadow of the Pyramids. It commenced on Mount Horeb, and ended in the isle of Patmos. From such circumstances we are not surprised to learn that its chronology is unreliable, chimerical, and incorrect; its history contradictory and incredible; its philosophy fallacious; its logic unsound; its cosmogony foolish and absurd; its astronomy fragmentary and childish; its religion pagan-derived; its morals defective, sometimes selfish, often extravagant, and in some cases pernicious. Its government, both temporal and spiritual, is, to some extent, both barbarous and tyrannical; while its theocracy is mere brute force. It presents us with narratives without authorities, facts and figures without dates, and records without names. We find no order in its arrangement, no system in its subjects or the manner of presenting them, and no connection in its paragraphs, and often no agreement in its statements, and no sense in its logic. It seems to teach nearly every thing upon nearly every question of morals which it touches. It apparently both sanctions and condemns nearly every species of crime to which it refers, and pours fulsome laudations upon the heads of some of the most bloody-minded and licentious men,--such as David, Solomon, &c.,--and holds them up as examples of true practical morality. It is often dark, ambiguous, and mysterious, as well as contradictory, not only in its lessons of morality, but in its account of the simplest occurrences, thus rendering it comparatively worthless as a moral guide; inasmuch as it is much easier to find out what is right and what is