Mr. Talmage tells us "that Science is a boy and "Revelation is a man." Of course, like the most he says, it is substantially the other way. Revelation, so-called, was the boy. Religion was the lullaby of the cradle, the ghost-story told by the old woman, Superstition. Science is the man. Science asks for demonstration. Science impels us to investigation, and to verify everything for ourselves. Most pro- fessors of American colleges, if they were not afraid of losing their places, if they did not know that Christians were bad enough now to take the bread from their mouths, would tell their students that the Bible is not a scientific book. I admit that I have said: 1. That the Bible is cruel. 2. That in many passages it is impure. 3. That it is contradictory. 4. That it is unscientific. Let me now prove these propositions one by one. First. The Bible is cruel. I have opened it at random, and the very first 213 chapter that has struck my eye is the sixth of First Samuel. In the nineteenth verse of that chapter, I find the following: "And he smote the men of Bethshemesh, because "they had looked into the ark of the Lord; even he "smote of the people fifty thousand and three-score "and ten men." All this slaughter was because some people had looked into a box that was carried upon a cart. Was that cruel? I find, also, in the twenty-fourth chapter of Second Samuel, that David was moved by God to number Israel and Judah. God put it into his heart to take a census of his people, and thereupon David said to Joab, the captain of his host: "Go now through all the tribes of Israel, from "Dan even to Beersheba, and number ye the people, "that I may know the number of the people." At the end of nine months and twenty days, Joab gave the number of the people to the king, and there were at that time, according to that census, "eight hundred thousand valiant men that drew the "sword," in Israel, and in Judah, "five hundred "thousand men," making a total of thirteen hundred thousand men of war. The moment this census was 214 taken, the wrath of the Lord waxed hot against David, and thereupon he sent a seer, by the name of Gad, to David, and asked him to choose whether he would have seven years of famine, or fly three months before his enemies, or have three days of pestilence. David concluded that as God was so merciful as to give him a choice, he would be more merciful than man, and he chose the pestilence. Now, it must be remembered that the sin of taking the census had not been committed by the people, but by David himself, inspired by God, yet the people were to be punished for David's sin. So,, when David chose the pestilence, God immediately killed "seventy thousand men, from Dan even to "Beersheba." "And when the angel stretched out his hand upon "Jerusalem to destroy it, the Lord repented him of "the evil, and said to the angel that destroyed the "people, It is enough; stay now thine hand." Was this cruel?