people who have doubted the fact of inspiration has steadily increased. These doubts have not been born of ignorance, they have not been suggested by the unthinking. They have forced themselves upon the thoughtful, upon the educated, and now the ver- dict of the intellectual world is, that the Bible is not inspired. Notwithstanding the fact that the church has taken advantage of infancy, has endeavored to control education, has filled all primers and spelling- books and readers and text books with superstition-- feeding all minds with the miraculous and super- natural, the growth toward a belief in the natural and toward the rejection of the miraculous has been steady and sturdy since the sixteenth century. There has been, too, a moral growth, until many passages in the Bible have become barbarous, inhuman and infamous. The Bible has remained the same, while the world has changed. In the light of physical and moral discovery, "the inspired volume" seems in many respects absurd. If the same progress is made in the next, as in the last, century, it is very easy to predict the place that will then be occupied by the Bible. By comparing long periods of time, it is easy to measure the advance of the human race. Com- pare the average sermon of to-day with the average 340 sermon of one hundred years ago. Compare what ministers teach to-day with the creeds they profess to believe, and you will see the immense distance that even the church has traveled in the last century. The Christians tell us that scientific men have made mistakes, and that there is very little certainty in the domain of human knowledge. This I admit. The man who thought the world was flat, and who had a way of accounting for the movement of the heavenly bodies, had what he was pleased to call a philosophy. He was, in his way, a geologist and an astronomer. We admit that he was mistaken; but if we claimed that the first geologist and the first astronomer were inspired, it would not do for us to admit that any advance had been made, or that any errors of theirs had been corrected. We do not claim that the first scientists were inspired. We do not claim that the last are inspired. We admit that all scientific men are fallible. We admit that they do not know everything. We insist that they know but little, and that even in that little which they are sup- posed to know, there is the possibility of error. The first geologist said: "The earth is flat." Suppose that the geologists of to-day should insist that that man was inspired, and then endeavor to show that 341