I am speaking, however, from a particularly wide experience of religious literature. For thirty years--ten years as a clerical student or professor, and twenty years as an interested observer of religious controversy--I have devoted much time to books and journals of this kind, and I repeat that there is no other branch of literature so flagrantly inaccurate and unscrupulous. A religious periodical (_The Christian World_, 20th August 1903), in the course of an editorial on "Candour in the Pulpit" (meaning lack of candour in the pulpit), said: "A foremost modern theologian, by no means of the radical school, has recorded his significant judgment that one of the main characteristics of apologetic literature is its lack of honesty; and no one who has studied theology can doubt that it has suffered more than any other science from equivocal phraseology." When a journal which has to consult the feelings of a large backward clientele uses this language, we may conclude that the situation is really bad. In fact, not even political journalism betrays such gross carelessness as to the truth of the statements with which it assails its opponents. "The more sacred our ideas are, the more savagely we fight for them," said Mr. Chesterton, defending the Inquisition. Mr. Chesterton's own genial method (except that one recognises the taint in his _Victorian Age in Literature_) disproves his aphorism. There is not the slightest excuse for the gross procedure of religious writers. I have in various works and articles given hundreds of examples of this procedure, and will be content to deal summarily with two of the chief types of misrepresentation--those relating to history and those relating to science. The classical examples in history are the clerical legends about the morality of the pagans. Here the clerical lie goes on its way from age to age without the slightest regard of the progress of historical research. Discoveries in the ruins (such as the Hammurabi Code, temple-literature, etc.) and a closer scrutiny of the sources used by the Greek historian Herodotus have made it quite clear that the old Mesopotamian civilisations were comparable to ours in moral sentiment and practice. Instead of women having to sacrifice their virginity in the temples at Babylon, we have abundant evidence that chastity was demanded and valued in brides, and that the priests insisted on purity. Every other moral sentiment was equally developed. We find the same high moral development in Egypt. All this is disregarded, and the superiority of the Hebrew and Christian sacred books is maintained by a resolute propagation of ancient fables.