Third.--That it cannot be relied on as a relation of actual occurrences, because, in the account of the creation, science has enabled us to detect several positively false statements in the account of the flood; also several gross and palpable mis-statements occur; because, in dealing with dates and genealogical statements, it contradicts and confuses its own narrative; because, even where it pretends to be the most real, it is alleged, in another book of the same Bible, to be purely allegorical. {48} Fourth.---That it ought not to be used as an educational work for the foregoing reasons, and because of the various obscene passages spread throughout the book; because, also, the youthful scholar will find cunning, craft, and cheating rewarded and preferred, while honesty and noble conduct is unnoticed; because he will find the practice of sacrifice is encouraged, and sacrifice, either human or bestial, is degrading and debasing; because he will find cruelties detailed at which his nature must revolt or become deteriorated. In Foxton's work on 'Popular Christianity,' a quotation is given from the _Prospective Review_, in which the writer suggests:-- 'That the Jews, like every other nation of antiquity, have framed for themselves a mythical history, which, with the lapse of time, has been received for fact. This at once releases us from the necessity of any elaborate contrivances for reconciling their belief with probability and the laws of nature; and exhibits a phenomenon so universal and so natural, that it would have been a miracle if the Jewish literature had been an exception to it. But the transition from regarding the first chapters of Genesis as an inspired record, to treating them as only a picture of the popular notions of the age in which they were produced, is too violent to be made at once by any large portion of the public. We are not sorry, therefore, that, from time to time, hypotheses are proposed which smooth the descent from one of these opinions to the other, and make the gradients safer. The clerical geologists would have been suspended by their diocesans, or hooted from their pulpits, if they had not been able, at first, to profess that their discoveries confirmed the Mosaic account of the deluge, and did not contravene that of the creation. Time has familiarised men with the idea that they are not to look into Scripture for geology; and we hope that its professors will soon come openly to avow this, and cease to torture the words of Genesis into a conformity with their science. Public opinion is so tyrannically intolerant, and its penal power so fearful, that we cannot expect the whole truth to be told, or even to be seen, at once. But while we admit the temporary value of such intermediate stages of opinion, we are bound to declare our judgment that they are merely temporary, and have no solid basis.'