2. Thou knowest my It is thou that hast cut down-sitting and mine upris- down Maacath; ing, thou understandest my Ashhur and Arabia thou thoughts afar off. hast scattered. All Jerahmeel thou hast subdued. But one of the worst cases of tampering with "inspired" texts is to be found in the New Testament. For nearly two thousand years the seventh verse of the fifth chapter of the first epistle of St. John has been saying this: "For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost; and these three are one." You may look high and low for that text in the Revised Version, but you will not be able to find it there. That text has slipped out of, or has been spirited away from, the bible, _revised_. After twenty centuries of time, the forgery blushes to look criticism in the face. The smuggled text for the trinity is still in the King James' bible, but the best scholarship of the church, at least, is ashamed of it, and has dropped it. What confidence can be placed upon men who wait for twenty hundred years before they will admit that what the Rationalist has been saying right along about the bible being a medley (to which from time to time the sects made such additions as suited their interests or from which they dropped whatever was prejudicial to their claims) is really true. But let us return to the first verse of the bible: It is evident that the writer of that verse believed in more than one god. This is shown by other references to the subject in the same chapter. He makes Elohim, or the gods, say, "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness." Still another text reads: "Behold the man has become as one of us," which is also in keeping with the "gods" who created the heaven and the earth. In reply to this criticism, it has been argued that the "we" or the "us" and the "our" in this part of the bible prove the doctrine of the trinity. The Catholic bible, in a footnote, plainly says so. Evidently, John Milton was of the same opinion, for in Paradise Lost he says:= ```... Therefore the omnipotent ```Eternal father--thus to his Son audibly spake: ```Let us make now man in our image... *= * Paradise Lost, book VII. But why should the words "us" and "our" prove that there are only three persons in the Godhead? Why may not "we" mean four, or forty? Why only three? It is really childish to see in "gods," or in "we," a proof of only three gods, and no more.