_Let them collect the best of their school to be found among the graduates of universities--as many as they please and from every land. Let the members of this selected group travel where they will, consult such libraries as they please, and employ every modern means of swift communication. Let them glean in the fields of geology, botany, astronomy, biology and zoology, and then roam at will wherever science has opened a way; let them take advantage of all the progress in art and in literature, in oratory and in history--let them use to the full every instrumentality that is employed in modern civilization; and when they have exhausted every source, let them embody the results of their best intelligence in a book and offer it to the world as a substitute for this bible of ours. Have they the confidence that the prophets of Baal had in their God? Will they try? If not, what excuse will they give? Has man fallen from his high estate, so that we can not rightfully expect as much of him now as nineteen centuries ago? Or does the bible come to us from a source that is higher than man--which?_ Any one listening to this flourish of trumpets would be led to think that Mr. Bryan has already met and routed the enemy, and is now celebrating his victory, instead of having yet to hear from the other side. Encouraged by the silence of his audience, the speaker grows bolder: _But our case is even stronger. The opponents of the bible can not take refuge in the plea that man is retrograding. They loudly proclaim that man has grown and that he is growing still. They boast of a world-wide advance and their claim is founded upon fact._ And Mr. Bryan expresses surprise that, with all this progress, the world is unable "to produce a better book to-day than man, unaided, could have produced in any previous age." Referring once more to "the opposition," he says: _The fact that they have tried, time and time again, only to fail each time more hopelessly, explains why they will not--why they can not--accept the challenge thrown down by the Christian world to produce a book worthy to take the bible's place._ Growing bolder and bolder, in the absence of "the enemy," and feeling confident that should "the enemy" be heard from, he could take refuge in a dignified silence, Mr. Bryan continues, like Don Quixote, to fight invisible foes: _They (the agnostics) have prayed to their God to answer with fire--prayed to inanimate matter, with an earnestness that is pathetic; they have employed in the worship of blind force a faith greater than religion requires, but their Almighty is asleep._