If you and I were omnipotent and had to re-make the Universe, I suppose there is no question but we should make man perfectly good (according to our notions of goodness) and that we should force him to remain good. And if you or I were omnipotent and had to reveal anything to men, we should write it large and clear in the sky, or in the heart, legible to all without effort, so that men should be forced to understand it. But God has neither done this nor anything like it. Therefore, since in other respects He has departed so very far from our notions of the best method, we cannot be surprised if He has not composed the Old Testament quite in the manner which would commend itself to us as the best. From our point of view the Bible teems with obvious imperfections. In the first place there are none of the modern arrangements for securing accuracy. No special newspaper reporters, not even contemporary writers of memoirs or histories, have handed down to posterity the exact words and deeds of Moses, David, Isaiah, and the great heroes and prophets of Israel. Might we not almost say that there have been as it were arrangements for securing inaccuracy? The authors wrote, in many cases, long after the events they recorded, under conditions which rendered accuracy of detail quite impossible. They have often been lengthy where we could have desired brevity (as for example in the enumerations of pedigrees and in the details of the furniture and ritual of the Temple or the Tabernacle) and very brief where we should have prized amplitude. Writing as Orientals for the most part write history, without statistical exactness, they have sometimes made mistakes (sometimes self-contradictory mistakes) in numbers and names, which it is now impossible to rectify. Nay, we can hardly acquit them sometimes of moral error; they have at all events sometimes appeared to praise, or at least not to blame, sometimes even to impute to God, acts that would seem to us—even when all due allowance is made for difference between ancient and modern standards of morality—deserving of express and severe censure.