general denunciation or humorous caricature of a book which has
worked such an amazing effect in literature as has the Bible would
be tempered by some recognition of the fact that these other
minds--poets, orators, sages, and scientists--have found illumination
and help in its pages. Liberal Christianity will be intellectually
broad. Certainly the greatest of modern pagans, Goethe, will not be
accused of favoritism toward the Bible, yet he said: "I esteem the
gospels to be thoroughly genuine, for there shines forth from them the
reflected splendor of a sublimity, proceeding from the person of
Jesus Christ, of so divine a kind as only the divine could ever have
manifested upon earth." The Earl of Rochester saw that the only
liberalism which objects to the Bible, in its true uses, is the
liberalism of licentiousness; and he left this saying: "A bad heart
is the great argument against this holy book." And Faraday, weeping,
said: "Why will people go astray when they have this blest book to
guide them?"

If we turn to literature we encounter many such liberal thinkers as
Theodore Parker, who calmly informs us: "This collection of books has
taken such a hold upon the world as has no other. The literature of
Greece, which goes up like incense from that land of temples and
heroic deeds, has not half the influence of this book. It goes equally
to the cottage of the plain man and the palace of the king. It is
woven into the literature of the scholar and colors the talk of the
street." That is the voice of the liberalism which includes rather
than excludes.

These were men not of the band of evangelical Christian preachers, who
are roughly classed as a set of persons unable to tell the truth about
the Bible, for fear they may lose their means of subsistence; these