III. _The Scriptures remain for just What they are._—Portions of the Bible command our most profound reverence and our most unqualified admiration. We respond heartily to some of the truly excellent moral maxims of the Bible, and read with rapture some of the selections of poetry from the Hebrew prophets. But right in close connection we often find stories of uncleanness, fornications, adulteries, and incests that the vilest newspaper of to-day would not dare publish. Jael meanly murders Sisera, and is praised for it, while the deceit and treachery of Rahab are commended in the New Testament. The story of Boaz and Ruth is only fit for a dime novel. Solomon’s Song is full of lasciviousness. Abram lies. Moses gets mad. David commits adultery and murders Uriah. Jacob is deceitful and a trickster; and so on to the end. Polygamy is shown to have been the rule, and not the exception, among Jehovah’s favorites. War is everywhere tacitly justified, and slavery is practised and not an abolitionist opens his mouth. We go to the New Testament, and He who is called the “Perfect One” curses a fig tree for not bearing fruit out of season, drives out with small cords men engaged in legitimate business, upsets their tables, and uses the most violent and reproachful language toward them. He shows want of respect for his mother, and is ambiguous and evasive in his conversation with the woman of Canaan—says he does not know whether he is going to the feast at Jerusalem or not, and then straightway sets out for the Holy City, and makes believe by his actions that he is going to one place, when he is actually going to another. We want a higher morality than is taught in the Bible. We want higher and more noble conceptions than are given in the parable of the “Unjust Judge,” and more just and equitable principles than are taught in the parable of the “Unjust Steward” or the “Laborers in the Vineyard” or the “Ten Talents.” We want a morality that relates to this life rather than to the next We do not want the possession of property held up as a crime, and poverty represented as a virtue entitling one to a seat in the future kingdom. We want good homes to live in now, rather than “mansions in the skies.” We do not want a morality that appeals to selfishness only, that discriminates in favor of celibacy, and that only tolerates marriage as a remedy for lust, as taught in the seventh chapter of First Corinthians. We want a higher morality than the morality of even the New Testament.