The Bible of Bibles; Or, Twenty-Seven "Divine" Revelations. Kersey Graves

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DON'T READ PERNICIOUS BOOKS.

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      The Quaker Church (of which the author was once a member) have a clause in their discipline forbidding their members to read pernicious books, which are defined by one of the founders of the Church (William Penn) to be "such books and publications as contain language which appears to sanction crime or wrong practices, or teach bad morals." And hundreds of cases cited in this work prove that the Christian Bible may be ranked with works of this character. If the advice of the Hindoo editor had been complied with many years ago,—to "revise all Bibles, and leave out their bad precepts and examples," and change their obscene language,—the Christian Bible might now be a very useful and instructive book. But we are willing to leave it to the conscience of every honest reader, who places truth and morality above Bibles and creeds, to decide, after reading this work, whether the Bible, with all its ennobling precepts, does not contain too strong an admixture of bad morality to make it a safe or suitable book to be relied on as a guide in morals and religion. According to Archbishop Tillotson, Bibles shape the morals and religion of the people in all religious countries,—they are derived from the examples and precepts of these "Holy Books." If this be true, we most solemnly and seriously put the question to every Bible reader, What must be the effect upon the morals and religion of Christian countries of such moral examples as Abraham, Moses, Noah, Isaac, Jacob, David, Solomon, and nearly all the prophets, with their long string of crimes, as shown in this work? Let us not be guilty of the folly of suffering our inherited, stereotyped predilections, and exalted veneration for "the Holy Book," to rule our moral sense, and control our judgment in this matter, but muster the moral courage to look at the thing in its true light. Let us be independent moralists and philanthropists, rather than slaves to Bibles and creeds. "Every book," says a writer, "has a spirit which it breathes into the minds of its readers;" and, if it contains bad morals or bad language, the habitual reading of it will gradually reconcile the mind to those immoral lessons, and finally cause them to be looked upon as God-given truths. Such is the omnipotent force of habit. And we appeal to all Bible readers to testify if this has not been their experience. All Christian professors, when they first commenced reading the Bible, doubtless found many things in it which shocked their moral sense, did violence to their reasoning faculties, and mortified their love of decorum. But a perseverance in reading it, through the force of habit and education, has finally reconciled their minds to those immoral lessons, and blinded the judgment, so that they are not now conscious of their real character and deleterious influence upon the mind.

TWO THOUSAND BIBLE ERRORS.

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      One of the strongest and most solemn lessons of human experience, and proofs of the blinding effect of a false religious education, may be found in the fact that the two thousand Bible errors brought to notice in this work have been overlooked from age to age by the great mass of Bible readers. So absolutely and deplorably blinded have they been in some cases, as to lead them to conclude, like Dr. Cheever of New York, that "the Bible does not contain the shadow of a shade of error from Genesis to Revelation." Such a perversion and stultification of the reasoning faculties was never excelled in any age or country. St. Augustine furnishes another striking illustration of the total wreck of mind and moral principle which an obstinate determination to accept the Bible with all its errors is capable of effecting. Having found a great many absurdities in the Bible which he could not reconcile with reason and sense, and hence discovering he must either give up his Bible or his reason, he chose the latter alternative, and declared in his "Book of Sermons" (p. 33), "I believe things in the Bible because they are absurd. I believe them because they are impossible" (as glaring an absurdity as ever issued from human lips). Such a desperate expedient to save his Bible and creed from going overboard shows that they had demoralized his mind, and made a complete wreck of his reason. This is the writer who declared he found and preached to a nation of people who had but one eye, and that situated in their foreheads, and another nation who had no heads, but eyes in their breasts. It seems a pity that this single-eyed nation became extinct; for Christ declared, "If thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light." Such an embodiment of light might have done much to enlighten the world. And this St. Augustine is the writer whom Eusebius pronounces "the great moral light of the Christian Church." And St. Irenaeus furnishes another deplorable example of the prostration or perversion of the moral faculties by accepting the Bible as a standard for morals when he justified the crime of incest by pointing to the example of "righteous Lot" and his daughters. The celebrated Albert Barnes was made a victim of great mental suffering for many years by his laborious but ineffectual attempts to reconcile the Bible with the dictates of reason. Hear what he says about the matter. We will present the case in his own language: "These difficulties (of reconciling the teachings of the Bible to reason) are probably felt by every mind that ever reflects on the subject; and they are unexplained, unmitigated, and unremoved. I confess, for one, that I feel them, and feel them more sensibly and powerfully the more I look at them, and the longer I live. I do not understand them, and I make no advance toward understanding them. I do not know that I have a ray of light upon this subject which I had not when the subject first flashed across my soul. I have read what wise and good men have written upon the subject; I have looked at their theories and explanations; I have endeavored to weigh their arguments,—for my whole soul pants for light and relief on these questions: but I get neither; and, in the anguish and distress of my soul, I confess I get no light whatever. I see not one ray to disclose to me the reason why sin came into the world, why the earth is strewn with the dying and the dead, and why man must suffer to all eternity. I have never seen a particle of light thrown on these subjects that has given a moment's ease to my tortured mind.... I trust that other men... have not the anguish of spirit which I have. But I confess, when I look on a world of sinners and sufferers, upon death-beds and graveyards, and upon a world of woe filled with hosts to suffer for ever; and when I see my friends, my parents, my family, my people, my fellow-citizens—when I look upon a whole race—all involved in this sin and danger; and when I see the great mass of them wholly unconcerned; and when I feel that God only can save them, and yet he does not do it,—I am struck dumb. It is all dark—dark—dark to my soul; and I cannot disguise it" (Practical Sermons, p. 124). There, reader, you have the candid confession of an honest-minded, orthodox, and one of the ablest and most talented writers that ever wielded the pen in defense of the Christian faith. And if such a talented and logical mind could find no reason, consistency, or moral principle in the dogmas of orthodoxy, we may readily ask, Who can? Thousands of other orthodox clergymen have doubtless been perplexed with the same difficulties, but have not had the honesty to confess it. Those who do not now perceive them can find the reason by putting their hands on their own heads. They will find their intellects or logical brains defective. Moral philosophers now find no difficulty in solving any of those problems which so much perplexed the mind of Mr. Barnes. They are all false and unfounded dogmas, except the prevalence of death and disease in the world. And these casualties are now known to be amongst the wisest and most useful dispensations of nature. (See chapter headed Natural and Moral Evil.) And had Mr. Barnes ascended to the plane of mental and moral science, instead of remaining down in the dark, orthodox, theological cellar, trying to squeeze truth out of old, dead, dried-up, dusty, theological dogmas, he would have readily found the solution to all his problems, and would have rejoiced in thus emerging into the glorious sunlight of truth.

BIBLES USEFUL IN THEIR PLACE.

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      We do not question but that Bibles served a useful purpose for those nations and tribes by whom and for whom they were written; but as they only represent the imperfect moral and religious conceptions of that age, and have always been sacredly guarded from improvement, to make them the rule of СКАЧАТЬ