Sir Matthew Hale and John Wesley were at least honest. They were too sincere to deny the plain teaching of the Bible. Dr. Farrar represents a more enlightened, but a more hypocritical, form of Christianity. He sneers at "reconcilers" like Mr. Gladstone, who try to bolster up the Creation story as a scientific revelation. But is he not a "reconciler" himself in regard to miracles? And does he not play fast and loose with truth and honesty in his attempt to clear the Bible of its guilty responsibility in connection with that witch mania which is one of the darkest episodes in Christian history? V. THE BIBLE AND FREETHOUGHT The Bible may well be called the persecutor's text-book. It is difficult, if not impossible, to find in all its pages a single text in favor of real freedom of thought. Dr. Farrar champions what he calls "true Christianity," to which he declares that all persecution is entirely "alien." This "true Christianity" appears to depend upon "the spirit" of Christ, and seems to have little or no relation to the letter of Scripture. But what is the actual fact, when we view it in the light of history? In one of his lucid intervals of mere common sense, Dr. Farrar makes an important admission with regard to the worse than Armenian atrocities of the Jewish policy of extermination in Palestine. Those atrocities of cruelty and lust are said to have been ordered by God, but Dr. Farrar says that on this point the Jews were mistaken. They thought they were doing God a service, but they thought so ignorantly. And how was their ignorance corrected? Not by a special monition from heaven, but by the ordinary progress and elevation of the human mind. "It required," Dr. Farrar says, "but the softening influence of time and civilisation to obliterate in the best minds those fierce misconceptions." Precisely so. And is it anything but the softening influence of time and civilisation that makes Christians like Dr. Farrar ashamed of the bloody deeds of their co-religionists; which bloody deeds, by the way, have always been justified by appeals to the teachings of the Bible? Let there be no mistake on this point. Dr. Farrar himself does not scruple to write of the "deep damnation of deeds of deceit and sanguinary ferocity committed in the name of Holy Writ." "In some of their deadliest sins against the human race," he further says, "corrupted and cruel Churches have ever been most lavish in their appeals to Scripture." He admits that "the days are not far distant when it was regarded as a positive duty to put men to death for their religious opinions," and that this was defended by Old Testament examples, and also by some texts from the New Testament. And it was "by virtue of texts like these" that enemies of the human race were "enabled" to combine the "garb and language of priests with the temper and trade of executioners."