their great authors, even sentences transmitted down the centuries.
The unravelling of the tangled threads woven into such books is a work
needing the highest scholarship and an infinite patience; few of us
are equipped for such labour. But let us ignore the work of the Higher
Criticism, and take the books as they stand, and the objection raised
to them as a basis for morality will at once appear.

Thus we read in the same book: "Thou shalt not avenge, nor bear any
grudge against the children of thy people, but thou shalt love thy
neighbour as thyself." "The stranger that dwelleth with you shall be
unto you as one born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself, for
ye were strangers in the land of Egypt." "Sanctify yourselves therefore
and be ye holy." Scores of noble passages, inculcating high morality,
might be quoted. But we have also: "If thy brother, the son of thy
mother, or thy son, or thy daughter, or the wife of thy bosom, or thy
friend which is as thine own soul, entice thee secretly saying, let us
go and serve other Gods ... thou shalt not consent unto him nor hearken
unto him; neither shalt thine eye pity him, neither shalt thou spare,
neither shalt thou conceal him, but thou shalt surely kill him; thine
hand shall be first upon him to put him to death." "Thou shalt not
suffer a witch to live." A man is told, that he may seize a fair woman
in war, and "be her husband and she shall be thy wife. And it shall be
that if thou hast no delight in her, then thou shalt let her go whither
she will." These teachings and many others like them have drenched
Europe with blood and scorched it with fire. Men have grown out of
them; they no longer heed nor obey them, for man's reason performs its
eclectic work on Revelation, chooses the good, rejects the evil. This
is very good, but it destroys Revelation as a basis. Christians have
outgrown the lower part of their Revelation, and do not realise that
in striving to explain it away they put the axe to the root of its