"Yes. Your mother made it true, as she would have made any other true, by the religious spirit that she brought into it. They are _all_ true--not only those we know of, but Buddhism and Mohammedanism, and even the queer faiths and superstitions of barbarian races, for they all have the same origin and object; and at the same time they are all so adulterated with human errors and vices, according to the sort of people who have had the charge of them, that you can't say any one of them is pure. No more pure than we are, and no less. For you to say that the rest are mistaken is just the pot calling the kettle black, Elizabeth. You may be a few degrees nearer the truth than those are who are less educated and civilised, but even that at present does not look so certain that you are justified in boasting about it--I mean your Church, you know, not you." "But we go by our Bible--we trust, not in ourselves, but in _that_." "So do the 'Dissenters,' as you call them." "Yes, I am speaking of all of us--all who are Christian people. What guide should we have if we let our Bible go?" "Why should you let it go? I have not let it go. If you read it intelligently it is truly a Holy Scripture--far more so than when you make a sort of charm and fetish of it. You should study its origin and history, and try to get at its meaning as you would at that of any other book. It has a very wonderful history, which in its turn is derived from other wonderful histories, which people will perversely shut their eyes to; and because of this undiscriminating ignorance, which is the blindness of those who won't see or who are afraid to see, it remains to this day the least understood of all ancient records. Some parts of it, you know, are a collection of myths and legends, which you will find in the same shape in older writings--the first dim forms of human thought about God and man and the mysteries of creation; and a great many good people read _these_ as gospel truth, in spite of the evidence of all their senses to the contrary, and take them as being of the same value and importance as the beautiful books of the later time. And there are other Bibles in the world besides ours, whether we choose to acknowledge them or not." Elizabeth listened with terror. "And do you say it is _not_ the light of the world after all?" she cried in a shaken voice. "There should be no preaching to the heathen, and spreading the good tidings over all lands?"