And here I cannot help adverting to the moral unfairness of infidelity. In a recent conference of working-men, one of them told the meeting that the history of the fall of man, in the second chapter of Genesis, was so improbable that he rejected all which came after. Perhaps the narrative is improbable to a mind intensely literal, unused to eastern modes of thought, and which cannot find the truth under those partially allegorical representations which most effectually teach the vast bulk of the human race. The same objections are urged against the sun standing still in the book of Joshua, and to the history of Jonah. I am not going to reply to these objections. Infidels do not want a reply. If they did, they would find scores. But what shall be said of the candor of a man who, because of such objections, rejects the Old Testament, which abounds in passages of the tenderest sympathy for the poor and for the suffering, which demands the most exact rectitude between man and man, and which taught a morality in those early days to which there is nothing at all approaching in the annals of Egypt, Greece, and Rome? Let me recommend you to turn to Leviticus 19:9, 10; Deuteronomy 24:13, 19-22. See how the slavery of the nations was mitigated among the Hebrews by the enforcement of the principle—which the Grecian and Roman law denied—that it was the duty of the master to treat his servants as men, to instruct them in his own religion, and to count them members of his household. Shame on men who have in the Bible such consideration for the toilers and such rebukes of oppressors, but who ignore all this, and hold up the Old Testament to scorn because of one or two difficulties to _their_ understanding.[3] Nothing so loudly proclaims that such infidelity is not a thing of “honest” doubt, but of a bad mind and of a bad heart. Difficulties there are in the Bible. I have studied most of those difficulties, and confess with gratitude that they have one by one disappeared. This I doubt not will be the case with them all. But to me it seems that I should deserve the contempt of man and the indignation of my Maker, if because of these difficulties, in times so remote and in usages so different from modern customs, I set aside the book which tells me of God’s profound interest in my race, which reveals my relation to a spiritual world, which has purified the lives and pacified the consciences of millions, and which has made just and considerate their treatment of others.