It brings tears into my eyes to think of Europe and America upon their knees, with blanched cheeks and trembling lips, before such a text. Why retain so unjust and tyrannical a commandment in a book which the people are asked to love and obey? And why translate such evil words into all the tongues of man? What has happened to the European races--to the descendants of the glorious Greeks and the proud Romans--that they can fawn over a book that commands a mother to kill her child for not believing as she does? Surely a blight of some kind must have fallen upon both the heart and intellect of the Western world--else how explain the gilt-edged bibles, containing these inhuman texts by the score, which young and old carry in their pockets, and almost worship? But the full import of this text is in the words we have printed in italics: "_Neither shall thine eye pity him_." It seems as though the being who gave the commandment feared that the natural affections might lead fathers or mothers to hesitate dipping their hands in the blood of their own sons and daughters; hence, the imperative, "Neither shall thine eye pity him." Yes, the heart must turn into a stone, even as the head must be stunned, before anyone can be a good Jew or a good Christian. PART III. I. The First Chapter of the Bible |MUCH depends upon what impression the first chapter produces upon our minds. If we find the statements therein contained accurate, precise, reasonable, original, of course, that fact will dispose us very favorably toward the remainder of the book; but if, on the other hand, the first chapter should appear to us as fantastical, fictitious, legendary, contradictory, grotesque--made up of gossip borrowed from here and there--naturally, we will be prejudiced against the chapters which follow. If the first chapter is not true, the credit of the book will certainly suffer. We may read the rest of the book as literature, or from curiosity, but as the word of God--no! Curious, is it not, that there is not a Christian scholar, or a university man, who does not admit that the opening chapter of the bible is legendary, that is to say, not true. Sir Oliver Lodge, who is one of the champions of the church, in his reply to Professor Haeckel, refers to the first chapter as "the old Genesis legend." Canon Farrar, who was a shining light in the Anglican church, calls this same chapter an allegory, that is to say, a fable. And the scholarly authors of the Encyclopedia Biblica do not hesitate to deal with the story of the creation in Genesis as mere gossip, borrowed from Assyrian and Babylonian sources. There is hardly a single educated Christian who accepts the first chapter of the bible as anything more than tradition or fiction.